London Mayor Boris Johnson yesterday helped launch a campaign designed to encourage households to step up their recycling efforts.
The Just One Thing campaign is being orchestrated by Recycle for London, the wider campaign run by Resource London, a partnership between the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) and WRAP.
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The campaign is backed by a revamped website that allows Londoners to quickly search by postcode what materials can be recycled in their area and a wave of new communications materials to help local authorities and businesses promote recycling awareness.
“This is a great way to boost the environment and save money, so let’s not waste any time and get into the habit of recycling more of our everyday items,” said Johnson.
Councillor Clyde Loakes, chair of Resource London as well as North London Waste Authority and Deputy Leader of Waltham Forest, said the new initiative would help tackle some of the specific challenges London faces as it battles to meet the Mayor’s target of delivering a 50 per cent recycling rate by 2020.
“London is a unique city, which is what makes it great,” he said in a statement. “However, with this uniqueness come challenges in terms of recycling habits. Many Londoners live in flats, which means we have communal bins, we also move around the city, and each borough can have a different approach to recycling – all of which can be barriers to recycling. Each household is different, and so too are our 33 boroughs, but we want everyone to do ‘Just One Thing’ more in their recycling habits – it will make a real difference to London’s environment.”
The campaign has calculated that if each Londoner recycled just one more plastic bottle a week for a year it would save enough energy to power Wembley Stadium for two years, while increasing the number of glass jars recycled by just one jar per Londoner per week would save 10,000 tonnes of glass from being thrown away every year – equivalent to more than half the weight of the glass on the Shard.
The campaign follows the publication of official figures this summer suggesting improvements in recycling rates across England have slowed, leaving the government at risk of missing a legally-binding EU target to ensure half of domestic waste is recycled by 2020.
In related news, broadcaster and campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall this week criticised Morrisons’ efforts to tackle food waste in response to allegations in his new BBC show Hugh’s War on Waste that the supermarket and many of its competitors were creating millions of tonnes of food waste through excessively tight quality standards for fruit and vegetables.
Morrisons responded to the criticism by trialling the sale of a new line of wonkier courgettes. But Fearnley-Whittingstall told the Guardian newspaper that it was a “frankly pathetic little trial” where the supermarket “put some really substandard squashy ended ones in one pile next to some gleaming perfect ones at the same price”.
Morrisons told the paper that it would begin selling lines of wonky potatoes, carrots, onions and parsnips at cheaper-than-normal prices across its stores, but added that the trial had shown customers had “voted with their feet” when offered wonkier produce.
Source: Recycling BG
