Have a Green Christmas and Play Your Part to Help Combat Climate Change

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council is encouraging everyone to recycle their Christmas waste this festive season. In a year in which the global call to combat climate change was headline news around the world, the Council is inviting you to make this festive season more sustainable – Recycling, reusing and cutting down on food waste are the gifts that everyone can give back to the environment this Christmas.

We all have the power to be proactive in the climate change fight and simple actions in our daily lives can and will make a huge difference. Nearly half of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from our consumption habits; so, by making small changes this Christmas to the things we buy, the clothes we wear, the food we eat and how we dispose of products, we are making a great contribution to both tackling climate change and living in harmony with our natural world.

Each Christmas, thousands of households take time during the festive break to log on to ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ to look for a tasty recipe to stop leftover festive foods going to waste, and for tips on how to freeze and reuse uneaten items with the annual ‘Ultimate Guide to Christmas Food Planning’. For food leftovers, visit www.lovefoodhatewaste.com which offers a wealth of information to help you make the most of all your festive food. It may seem obvious, but clever planning and preparation can help you to save time, save money and waste less food.

So much of the waste produced over the festive season can be recycled, it just takes a second to think what bin this should go into. The main sources of extra rubbish are packaging, cardboard, glass and drinks cans, most of which can be recycled in your blue bin. By recycling, re-using items and cutting food waste, we can all give back to the environment this Christmas.

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council Chairperson, Councillor Valerie Harte said, “This year we are all much more aware of our impact on the environment and have realised that recycling plays a key part in reducing that impact to create a greener future in our local community. Our recycling rate is currently 49.6%, and we must achieve 70% recycling by 2030! We are continuing to focus on ways that we can improve our recycling performance. As we are producing more waste, it is so important that we all use our recycling bins correctly. Studies show that a significant portion of the black bin waste collected could have been recycled. With so much extra waste being produced, Christmas is the perfect time to use your blue and brown recycling bins to their full potential and increase household recycling rates.”

Cllr Harte continued, “I really want to encourage all of our residents across the district to ‘Step Up’ their recycling over Christmas and beyond. One of the easiest ways residents can address this issue is by recycling more of the right things, more often.”

Don’t forget to recycle your glass, plastic bottles and containers, chocolate, and sweet tins, wrapping paper and cards (without glitter), cardboard boxes, empty aerosols, and drinks cartons in your blue bin. Please remember that all food waste must go into the brown bin.

For those things that will not fit in your bins, visit one of the 10 Household Recycling Centres (HRC’s), which accept a much wider range of items such as Christmas trees, cardboard, batteries, electrical equipment, TVs, monitors and much more. Waste must be pre-sorted for recycling.

More information regarding the Council’s Refuse and Commercial Waste Collections and Household Recycling Centres (HRCs) Christmas and New Year Holiday Arrangements, can be found by visiting: https://www.newrymournedown.org/bin-collection-information.