not putting food waste into general waste bins but into organic waste bins.Įnergy is required to recycle the product and to change its physical properties into something totally different.įor example, the plastic from bottles might be made into public benches or fleece jackets. Some campaigns have focused on ensuring that our waste is correctly sorted into different bins e.g. When waste materials are collected and separated out into their different component ingredients, these can then be remade into different products. ‘Bags for Life’ and more robust plastic shopping bags have largely replaced single-use supermarket shopping bags. In recent years in Northern Ireland, one major success in this area has been different initiatives to encourage people to reuse their shopping bags. People might reuse food containers and bottles instead of throwing them out or use travel coffee mugs instead of single-use cups. This occurs as people use different materials again but do not convert them into different products. The 3 R’s of the waste hierarchy are: Reduce. Some campaigns have also focused on ensuring that people reduce the amount of waste that they produce, for example food waste. In case you don’t know what it refers to, it means the order in which actions are to be taken to reduce waste and improve the waste management process. Initiatives are introduced to encourage people to turn lights off, share lifts and take shorter showers in order to reduce energy. Thankfully there are four easy-to-follow stepping stones that we can apply to everyday life: reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose. Living a more sustainable lifestyle can be very rewarding but also a bit daunting. This is when people purchase less ‘stuff’ so that it reduces the amount of energy required to manufacture and transport goods. The new decade is upon us, and many of us have the same goal in mind: to be more eco-friendly. Where this is not possible, then re-using products or recycling is better for the environment than disposal in a landfill. Reduce Reuse Recycle Recycling is a hot topic and many of us are already doing our best to be more conscientious when it comes to our purchasing and disposal decisions: - We might make more conscious choices about which products to buy based on the ability to recycle the packaging. The image below shows that preventing waste in the first place is the most favourable option. There will also be a reduction in the amount of waste that ends up in the council-run landfill sites. The idea of reduce, reuse and recycle is one that forms part of the waste hierarchy and has helped people to think about the environmental impact that they have.
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