Recycle Your Festive Waste This Christmas!

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council is encouraging everyone to recycle their Christmas waste this festive season. There’s so much going on at Christmas, that recycling often falls to the bottom of the list of things to do. Yet recycling around the home is as easy as putting the right thing in the right bin!

Most 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.

According to ‘Love Food Hate Waste, we will throw away more than 4 million tons of perfectly edible food, this includes 263,000 turkeys, 7.5million mince pies and more than 170 tonnes of sprouts! For food leftovers, their website www.lovefoodhatewaste.com 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.

Newry, Mourne and Down District Council Chairperson, Councillor Michael Savage 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 52%, 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 to pre-pandemic levels.” 

Cllr Savage continued, “The Council is committed to recycling, and we really appreciate the efforts that our residents have made this year. We want to continue to encourage everyone to continue to ‘recycle more of the right things more often’ to reduce contamination in our recycling bins.”

Remember 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.

For more information regarding the Council’s Refuse and Commercial Waste Collections and Household Recycling Centres (HRCs) Christmas and New Year Holiday Arrangements, please visit: https://www.newrymournedown.org/bin-collection-information.