Plastic bottles
Environmental benefits: Plastic bottles are made from oil and recycling them means less oil needs to be extracted. It also reduces landfill and potentially cuts CO2 emissions. It’s also more energy efficient to use recycled plastics than raw materials when making new products. Recycling one plastic bottle saves enough energy to run a 60-watt lightbulb for six hours.
There are about 50 different types of plastics, with hundreds of different varieties. It’s important to recycle plastics – or at least reduce your consumption – as most types take hundreds of years to decompose in landfill sites.
How to recycle: Around 92% of all UK local authorities now offer collection facilities for plastic bottles either from your kerbside collection scheme or at recycling centres. The most commons types of plastic collected are clear plastic soft drinks bottles and opaque plastic bottles, like milk bottles.
Some councils are able to recycle more types of plastic than this, so check with yours. Supermarkets also provide recycling banks for plastic bags and sometimes plastic bottles.You do not have to remove the label but you should take off the lids so they can be crushed flat.
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