Kerb your desire to make rubbish (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Kerb your desire to make rubbish

It's not just coincidence that this year's Ideal Home exhibition chose recycling as its theme. Let's face it, recycling has become part of our everyday life and routine particularly in the home.

And with kerbside collections on hand, loads of recycling points and ten recycling centres in Wiltshire, recycling has shed its marginal image and become the cool thing to do.The Ideal Home boasted green on the menu of its show kitchen with Oliver Heath, one of the UK's top designers, putting together a state of the art kitchen using recycled products.

It had hard-wearing work surfaces made from 85 per cent recycled glass, attractive, durable, 100 per cent recycled floor tiles, wall tiles and coasters made from recycled bottles, and 100 per cent organic, solvent-free paint ideal for allergy or asthma sufferers. The result was a kitsch-free kitchen challenging many myths about recycled materials.

The kitchen was also designed and equipped to make sorting recyclables easy.

While our kitchens might not match up to cool designer standards, there is no doubt it tends to be the hub of recycling activity and it's here you need to get sorting systems in place if you want to be a successful recycler.

Make sure you have containers on hand for the main recyclables like cans, glass and paper and a caddy for green waste like peelings. In Europe, where recycling is embedded in the culture, many kitchens have bins with triple compartments to ease the pain of sorting, but nevertheless we are fast catching on here.

Meanwhile you can re-use old plastic bags as containers for sorted recyclables. Try our jute Recycle for Wiltshire bags or purchase from the plethora of recycling goodies now flooding the consumer markets. Some manufacturers now supply automatic pull out double bins for mounting within standard sized kitchen cabinets while others have produced good looking wipe clean boxes that can be re-used for that trip to the recycling centre. Empty tins can also be put in black kerbside boxes and aluminium foil containers used for takeaways can also be recycled. However make sure they are clean.

Plastic containers make up a large amount of our waste. One way of cutting back is to opt for milk in glass bottles remember that the local dairy can reuse milk bottles up to 25 times.

You can reduce the number of plastic bags you accumulate by making sure you always have re-usable bags to hand, and you can cut down on plastic packaging by buying fruit and vegetables loose. Most plastics can be recycled, and while we do not collect them at kerbside, they can be taken to our ten household recycling centres.

Paper is another excellent material that can be recycled. So remember to keep newspapers and magazines and pop them in your black box or alternatively take old magazines to your local doctor's surgery.

If you want to minimise your waste as well as recycle it, you can stop junk mail and faxes being sent to you by contacting the Direct Marketing Association. It is very simple, just go to the Mailing Preference Service website and register your address.

Recycling and waste reduction have become part of everyday lives in North Wiltshire, following the roll-out of wheelie bins and the introduction of kerbside collecting boxes to nearly every home in the district.

North Wiltshire's household rubbish is emptied into landfill pits at Compton Bassett. Across the county as a whole 250,000 tonnes of rubbish are produced, which is 685 tonnes a day and the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes a household a year.

In 2003 North Wiltshire recycled just five per cent of its waste, a figure set to rise to 18 per cent by the end of March.

From July Kennet District Council will collect householders' rubbish every two weeks. Householders will be provided with a black wheelie bin.

On the alternate weeks Kennet will empty residents' black recycling box.

The aim of the change is to encourage householders to recycle more.

The council says many people continue to put recyclable items into their normal household rubbish, which goes to landfill.