World Recycling Day is celebrated on 18 March 2025, it is a day to recognise the importance of recycling to secure the future of the environment, urging individuals, communities, and businesses worldwide to think resourcefully about waste.

Most people know about the importance of recycling but perhaps don’t know much about what else we can do before we recycle an article.

The three ‘R’s’ are important to consider:

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

Reduce simply means use less and this is the best way to keep the environment clear of waste. Use, buy or ask for the amount you actually need rather than have too much and waste it.

Reuse means finding a new use for items you might normally throw away. Wash a container out for a second use, take old shopping bags to the supermarket or give toys to a charity shop.

Recycling happens when the item is changed into a new product, for example, a plastic bottle can be made into new plastic bottles, frisbees, or a bird food holder.

However, there are some items which are thrown away because people don’t really know where to recycle them or what to do with them. These include soft plastic food wrappers, hard plastic boxes or containers, shopping receipts, bubble wrap and crisp bags!

Some articles can be recycled but are not always considered such as silver paper, stamps, shower soap containers and CDs.

Activity

Create a survey to ask people about recycling difficult items.

• Do they know which items are difficult but can be recycled?
• If so, how and where?
• Ask a tricky question such as ‘can shopping receipts be recycled?’ (They usually can’t because they are coated with a chemical compound which is difficult to recycle).
• Do they know where their nearest recycling facilities are located?

The survey can be either be presented as an open choice question, or as a list of hard-to-recycle items to help people think about each of them.

Present the results and draw some conclusions.

• What do people find the hardest items to recycle?
• Do they know where / what to do with these?
• As a result of your survey have you encouraged people to think more about finding out about recycling difficult items?
• Find out what your local authority is doing to encourage recycling in the area.

Summary

It’s very important to keep the message about recycling alive in people’s minds all the time. One of the big concerns about recycling at home is the large number of bins which block the streets especially on bin collection day. What do people think about that?

Some websites with useful information include:

BBC News: 10 things you can’t put in your household recycling

Method Recycling: Recycling 101: Hard to Recycle Items

This teaching resource was written by Paula Richardson for the Geographical Association.