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Come on, admit it. We’ve all got clothes in our wardrobe that we’ve never worn for years and we know we’ll never wear again. Taking your old clothes to the local charity shop, jumble sale or recycling bank is a great excuse to get rid of those awful clothes your partner thinks are still trendy, while getting rid of a load of rubbish and creating extra space at the same time! And it’s all for a good cause.
Charities such as The Salvation Army, Oxfam, TRAID and Scope are big collectors of old clothes, either through charity shops and recycling banks or for sorting and selling on, often abroad for aid purposes. So donating your old clothes is definitely a good way to make the best use of them.
Buying second hand clothes is now in definitely in vogue too, with dedicated followers of fashion such as Kylie and Geri Halliwell leading the way. Vintage boutiques offer ranges of designer classics, but can be a bit on the pricey side, so why not raid your local charity shop to pick up a real bargain? Some high street shops such as Top Shop also offer a selection of vintage clothing, so you can create your own distinct look and feed good about your recycling effort.
Around one million tonnes of junk mail and magazines get binned each year! But it’s easy to enjoy a junk mail free home and cut down on the rubbish in your bin at the same time by registering with the Mailing Preference Service.
There’s a number of easy ways to register:
Visit the MPS website at www.mpsonline.org.uk
Or e-mail to mps@dma.org.uk
Or write to: The Mailing Preference Service, FREEPOST 22, London W1E 7EZ stating that you would like your details included to stop receiving unsolicited direct mail
Or call 020 7291 3310.
A massive 60% of the contents of your dustbin can be recycled? So why not give your bin a break and drop off your paper, card, glass bottles and jars and cans at the recycling banks located at most supermarkets? Click here to find your nearest recycling facility.
By doing this you’ll reduce your household bin by nearly one third!
What to make a quick £million? Who doesn’t, but did you know that if you’re really canny there’s £34 million worth of empty aluminium drink cans in the UK just waiting to be cashed in and recycled?
Don’t believe us? Well the reason is that aluminium is really valuable and the sort that’s made into the billions of drinks cans we see on our supermarket shelves can be recycled and used time and time again to make new drinks cans. So there really shouldn’t be any need to mine new aluminium at all for new drinks cans if we recycled all the ones we currently use!
If you’d like to find out more details just visit, www.alupro.org.uk or www.cashforcans.co.uk and start earning your first £million! And even if you don’t want the money for yourself, there are thousands of charities, schools and worthy causes who would be glad of the money or who have set up aluminium can recycling schemes near to where you are and would love your aluminium empties.
We produce over 26 million tonnes of household rubbish in the UK and Northern Ireland every year, so there's plenty of scope for us to Rethink Rubbish in the home!
By thinking about the types of goods we buy, (see Rethink Rubbish shopping), how we use them and where we dispose of them, we can dramatically reduce the amount of rubbish our homes churn out.
Whilst we can't eliminate rubbish altogether, there are hundreds of ways in which we can cut down on what we throw away. So, whether we're recycling, finding new uses for 'junk' or simply reducing what we create in the first place, with a little effort, we can all make our homes cleaner and greener!
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We keep three separate bins at home for used cans, bottles and paper, then drop them off at the local supermarket recycling banks when we ago shopping. It's really that easy!
I'm a great believer that if everyone did a little, then it would go a long way to help the big problem of rubbish.
Sharron Davies
Patron, Rethink Rubbish campaign
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