Recycling

Bracknell Forest Council encourages waste minimisation and recycling, and has a policy that “no excess rubbish outside or overloading a bin” will be collected. We acknowledge that we are a throw-away society, but as consumers we can choose to reduce the amount of waste produced by thoughtful purchasing. View further tips on Waste Minimisation.

Landfill rubbish Every hour UK homes produce enough rubbish to fill the Royal Albert Hall in London. In the UK, over 28 million tonnes of household waste is produced each year and most of this gets taken to polluting landfill sites. Landfilling of waste is now severely restricted and councils have an annual allowance of how much can be thrown away. Any councils exceeding their allowance will be heavily fined. Around 60 per cent of rubbish discarded in wheeled bins could easily be recycled or composted.

In Bracknell Forest there are many opportunities to recycle our waste. For example:

Each house in the borough can have a blue bin for plastic bottles, food tins and drinks cans, paper and card. The blue bin is emptied from the kerbside on the alternate weeks to your landfill collection.
Across the Borough there are 39 public recycling sites where other items for recycling can be taken, including glass, textiles, shoes, books and foil.
The Civic Amenity Site at Longshot Lane has banks and dedicated areas for all recyclable items, including scrap metal, electrical equipment, motor oil and batteries.
The Council offers parents the chance to claim £30 for going green and using reusable nappies. 8 million disposable nappies are thrown away in the UK every day. Disposing of them is very costly and is not an environmentally friendly option as they can take hundreds of years to rot away.

The benefits of recycling:

Allows materials to be used again and made into useful products.
Conserves valuable natural resources.
Saves expensive and wasteful landfill costs.
Helps maintain a sustainable lifestyle for future generations.

Ideally, recycling can go on indefinitely without danger of resources running out, or air or water becoming too polluted, resulting in good or improved environments for all.

The Materials Recovery Facility in Reading, which was built as part of the re3 joint waste partnership with Bracknell Forest, Reading and Wokingham, sorts recyclables. This means that residents can mix paper, cards, cans and plastic bottles in their blue bins, or in their green kerbside boxes if they do not have space for a bin.

For more information about waste minimisation and recycling please look at our A-Z.