Creative ways of disposing recyclable waste
By Vilma Gerulyte
How frequently do you find yourself thinking about recycling? Probably fairly often - food packaging is stamped with recycling signs politely informing you to recycle, and rubbish bins on every street remind you to separate your trash and dispose of your food waste responsibly.
No surprise, plastic is a huge problem. The Telegraph published uninspiring statistics that UK still fails to recycle almost all of its plastic – only 24% of plastic waste was recycled in 2014. What is more, the World Wide Fund estimates that since then the situation has improved very little, with only less than a third of waste going to recycling centres.
Levi’s, a brand of denim jeans, attempted to tackle the low recycling rates by incorporating at least 20% of post-consumer plastic recycled content into their products – jeans and trucker jackets. A story, originally featured in The Guardian in 2013, revealed about 8 plastic 500 ml bottles would be enough to make a pair of jeans. A polyester fibre made out of plastic, blended with the cotton fibre, produces jeans that feel like regular jeans – a wearable item literally made out of garbage.
What does that mean? There are more ways of recycling than just sorting out litter. Because what is recycling in the first place? It’s giving new life to old items without using new materials. And this can be done on an individual level, without the involvement of big organizations. If used correctly, we can get far more out of plastic than we have in the past.
Nowadays there’s a popular trend of organised storage, with jars and cans storing everything from cereal to crayons. And plastic bottles can do the job as well. With a bit of help from scissors, hot glue, some paint or left-over environmentally unfriendly gift-wrapping paper, plastic bottles can be transformed into phenomenal pieces of interior design. That’s not even to mention the reduced costs that come with it instead of buying items made specifically for storage purposes.
Nathalie Craik, an ethical compliance manager at Lush, and her mother found their own way in recycling materials instead of disposing of them. They began using them to make their own hand–made items such as bags, hats and scarves, an activity that grew into business named ‘better.’.
“It began from not using animal any stuff, instead making our products from waste,” says Nathalie, before revealing: “I studied Fashion and Textile Management at university and that is where I learned all the negative impact the environment is facing with frequently used unsustainable materials.” And now, with the target goal to make a difference, the mother-daughter duo use recycled acrylic, recycled cotton and vegan leather to create long lasting items and accessories.
But there is more to recycling than reapplying plastic, paper, textiles or even metal, as reuse of biodegradable waste, such as food, also exists. Egg shells are a commonplace rubbish that usually ends up in landfills that, in large quantities, takes up a lot of valuable space. But due to their properties, egg shells might as well be used at home as either garden compost or an organic calcium supplement for teeth and bones.
Coffee is the one of the most popular beverages in the world and all that amount of coffee grounds leaves its own effect on the environment. Anna Brightman, 25, a former manager at Aldi, and her brother William discovered a way of how to minimise the percentage of wasted coffee grounds by making them key ingredient in their beauty products. Anna says: “We make all of our products from the upcycled ingredients, so essentially taking by-products from the food industry and repurposing them into sustainable skincare products.”
Referring to the origins of the whole beginning, “we found out from our local coffee shop that they produce so much coffee that they pay the council to have it disposed of at landfill. Then we found out that at landfill it actually rots and produces methane, so it has this huge negative environmental impact that we didn’t even realise,” explains Anna. Coffee has many benefits for the human body – from exfoliating skin to reducing inflammation, so it makes sense to turn it into a face scrub instead of throwing it out as every other trash.
Creativity, arts and crafts can’t be everyone’s cup of tea nor can it be always time-permitting. But still it is possible to level up any recycling game – why not try turning the process into a family competition and those who recycle most, get a sustainable treat as a reward?
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