Did you know that each year on Valentine’s Day, the UK sends around 25 million cards, uses approximately 13,500 miles of gift wrap, generates an additional 7,500 tonnes of plastic packaging and 17,000 tonnes of cardboard from online shopping and boxes of chocolates (Business Waste, 2024), and sends a staggering 220 million roses! (Floral Daily, 2024)
Purchasing at that scale means it’s a time of year where it is helpful to remind our residents how to dispose of their additional purchases responsibly. Contaminating our recycling bins with the wrong or dirty items can mean the contents are rejected and sent to landfill or for energy recovery. Around one fifth of recycling is unrecyclable because of this issue (Dennis, 2022). It’s easily done too, in 2022 84% of households were unintentionally contaminating their recycling bins and this underlines the importance of timely reminders about how to recycle right (WRAP, 2022).
Based on the top three most common gifts: cards, flowers, food and drink (Simon, 2024), the most likely potential contaminants for recycling streams around Valentine’s Day are, glittery cards or wrapping paper, plastic wrapping from bunches of flowers and food and drink packaging which is presented incorrectly. Based on this we, together with local authority partners, have created a simple set of assets and messages for you to use to help your residents recycling right this Valentine’s Day.
Recycling is part of the solution, but we also know how important it is to minimise our waste. We have prepared a short assembly which can be distributed to schools which includes a short quiz concerning the level of consumption on Valentine’s Day, the level of resource use in the UK and alternatives to buying gifts – buy less, but do more.
You can download the assets and assembly at: https://pledge2recycle.co.uk/local-authority/
