Kingston residents can now add more items to their green recycling box.
From the start of the month residents can now recycle more metal and plastic items as Kingston Council tries to cut non-recyclable rubbish by half.
Councillor Sharon Hartley, Lead Member for Sustainability and Sport, said: “Sending rubbish to landfill sites just makes no sense, so we have found yet more ways to recycle for our residents. Better news for the environment.”
Residents can now recycle ready meal trays, yoghurt pots, fruit punnets, margarine tubs and laundry table containers. In addition, it will be also possible to recycle foil, foil food trays, aerosol cans, metal packaging, jar lids as well as sweet and biscuit tins in the green box. But the scheme does not include plastic bags, plastic films or food packaging layers. More detailed information about the local recycling scheme is available on the website of the Royal Kingston.
Residents in the Kingston Area approved the decision. A man on his fifties said: “I didn’t know about the changes to the recycling system, but I really appreciate this new set up. In my family we are consuming a lot of yoghurt and it was a shame to trash all the plastic containers in to the general waste.”
The recent changes mean that Kingston should cut the amount it can’t recycle and could save around £1.6m in landfill tax per year.
Expanding the range of recyclable materials will help most households to recycle more than half of their household waste. More recycling also means an increase in financial resources of the Royal borough. Viridor Waste Management sells the materials on behalf of the council, with the borough receiving 85 per cent of any income generated.
According to the Kingston Council’s website, the landfill site at Beddington Lane in the neighbouring London Borough of Sutton receives approximately 365,000 tonnes of rubbish every year.
