Sunday, September 16, 2007

10 Things you Never Knew Could Be Recycled

If you recycle tin cans and drinks cans, did you know you can also recycle:
  • Foil milk bottle lids

  • Pie tins from ready meals

  • Metal dishes from takeaway food

  • Foil lids of yogurt pots

  • Used aluminium foil (try to wash and reuse it a few times first)

  • Metal lids of jam jars

  • Metal bottle caps

  • Paint tins

  • Spray cans e.g WD40, hairspray etc

  • The metal foil from cigarette and tobacco packaging
But you can't recycle shiny plastic like crisp packets, even though it may look like foil. The way to test whether it's recyclable foil or non-recyclable plastic is to scrunch it in your hand. If it stays scrunched, it's foil. If it springs back, it's plastic.

Cartoon from climatecartoons.org. Click on the picture to enlarge.

4 comments:

benjymous said...

Don't forget TetraPak cartons - lots of council tips have collection facilities, or you can send them back to TetraPak for recycling.

Anonymous said...

We're canny when it comes to metal. We sort it into ferrous and non-ferrous metals, then sell it to the scrap merchant.

That way it gets recycled and we get a bit of extra cash.

As well as all the things you mention, our metals bins get nails and screws that I can no longer re-use, car parts (I do a lot of my own servicing), horseshoes and pieces of copper pipe I've found beside the road, metal parts from broken toys, pieces of wire, an old wheel I found, and so on.

I've also been known to scrounge cans out of bins, metal items from skips (with permission and to the bemusement of most builders) and even collected some old saucepans that were free for uplift and advertised as "only suitable for non-cooking use".

It all adds up, and brought back memories for a couple of old ladies who told me "we used to do this in the war to help make Spitfires"!

As for TetraPak cartons, unfortunately there are no recycling facilities for them in Aberdeenshire. We've been told there will be facilities soon - but more than three years have passed since we were told that.

Camphor said...

Interesting tip to differentiate between plastic and foil. Thanks. :)

Was my pleasure to host the Carnival.

Anonymous said...

Sadly in the City of Nottingham we are not allowed to put any kind of aluminium foil into our recycling bins! This seems very odd to me because as a child one of the few things that went for recycling was aluminium milk bottle tops. Bluew Peter paid for a whole Guide Dog for the Blind with milk bottle tops, but now we can't recycle them at all here.