A green tag proves you’ve got your recycling sorted
It’s important that everyone using council kerbside collection sorts their household waste into the right bins: red lid for rubbish, yellow or green lid for recycling.
Every week, we check a random selection of over 100 home recycling bins for contamination.
Contaminants are items in your recycling bin we can’t recycle, like fabrics, household goods, polystyrene, and food scraps (just to name a few common culprits).
The bins we check get a tag:
- Green: awesome recycling with no contamination
- Orange: pretty good, with only minor contamination
- Red: lots of contamination found
Looking after your environment and helping reduce landfill costs is its own reward. But it’s nice to get a little prize too. So, check what’s going into your recycling bin (and what should be going in), and join our green-tag recyclers to be in to win!
Recycling contamination is a big problem
If a collection truck picks up a recycling bin with things like spoiled food, nappies, or broken glass, it can contaminate the entire load. That means everything in the truck might have to go to landfill instead of being recycled and reused.
Other contaminants, like soft plastics, can cause issues with the machinery we use to sort and process your recycling.
Cameras on our collection trucks can help us spot contamination and identify the bin it came from. But by the time it’s in the truck, it can be too late. Good recycling habits are the key to making sure all our town’s recycling is able to be re-used and re-purposed.
