This year marks the 20th anniversary of Recycle Week – the UK’s largest national annual recycling campaign – and we want to inspire children, families and whole communities to get involved in The Big Recycling Hunt from 16th- 22nd October.
It’s easy to forget how much life has changed in the past 20 years. Back in 2004 a new social media platform known as “The Facebook” had just launched and Netflix had a million subscribers to its DVD rental service. Today, social media is fundamental to how many of us receive information, whilst Netflix has changed the way we watch TV with 238 million subscribers to its streaming service.
In 2004, household recycling was still in its infancy in the UK, with just 19% of household waste recycled or composted. By 2021, that figure had increased to 44%, no doubt aided by the expansion of kerbside recycling services. The planned recycling reforms across the UK aim to increase this even further. But as local authorities will be all too aware, we could be capturing more recycling through the systems we already have.
WRAP’s recycling tracker, which has been supporting and informing our campaigns since 2004, tells us that while recycling is an established behaviour with nine out of ten UK citizens regularly doing so, many still don’t recycle all the materials we can. Some of the most common of these “missed capture” items that end up in the rubbish bin are:
- Empty aerosols
- Detergent or cleaning product bottles
- Toiletries/shampoo bottles
- Plastic pots and tubs
- Food tins.
The Big Recycling Hunt will call on everyone to unearth these missed opportunities from around the home. Whether it’s relying on out-of-date knowledge, not having a recycling bin in the bathroom, or the perceived “yuck” factor of rinsing tins and bottles, we want to overcome the habits that lead to missed capture and help everyone to recycle the right things, more often.
We know many local authorities have engaged local school children in Recycle Week activity over the past 20 years. We want to build on this, so that future generations grow up as clued-up on recycling as they are on social media and streaming services. We will be reaching out to more than 30,000 schools and teachers to get children involved in The Big Recycling Hunt, with a special toolkit and resources available to help them take part.
Please encourage local primary schools in England and Northern Ireland to sign up for The Action Pack to receive all the latest information and details of how they can get their schools to take part. All this information will be available towards the end of the Summer.
In Wales, the next phase of the Be Mighty campaign will use the week to encourage citizens to recycle more of their unavoidable food waste.
In 2022, 14% of UK adults recalled seeing or hearing about Recycle Week, and 47% of those said they did something differently as a result. This equates to an impressive 3.7 million citizens.* We couldn’t have achieved this without the support and campaign amplification of our partners, local authorities and brands.
The partner toolkit with everything you need to get involved will be available from late summer, and you can sign up for updates via our Collections and Recycling newsletters.
Much of the campaign seeks to encourage citizens to check their local recycling services using the Recycling Locator tool. To embed the Recycling Locator widget on your website email us at: PartnerEnquiries@wrap.org.uk. Now is also the time to check your authority’s locator data is up to date – any updates can be emailed to: LA-Recycling@wrap.org.uk.
*These results come from a robust tracker survey that ran after Recycle Week. The survey is a UK representative sample.
