Spring is in the air and what better way than to do a clean-out of your home.
Did you know that there are so many different ways to keep your environment clean?
Mpact Recycling’s communications manager Donna-Marie Noble shares the 10 best ways of keeping the environment clean through recycling.
- Sort your household waste into paper, plastic, glass and cans
This can easily be done by having four different coloured or marked containers and sorting each day. The balance of the waste would be classified as rubbish and go into your normal refuse bin for weekly collections. Doing this can reduce your waste by 60 to 70 per cent.
- Put all your sorted paper into your local green Ronnie bag for the weekly kerbside collections.
If kerbside collections do not happen in your area, make sure to drop off your paper and cardboard at your nearest Ronnie Bank located conveniently countrywide.
- Ronnie Banks
Ronnie Banks are located at schools, churches, old-age homes; community centres – they are used as a fundraising tool for the community. So be sure to support them by dropping off your paper on a weekly basis. A full list of Ronnie Banks is available at www.mpactrecycling.co.za
- Support your local recyclers or trolley pushers.
Put out those other recyclables (plastic, glass and cans) into clear bags for them to easily take on their rounds each week.
- Live in a townhouse complex? No problem.
Purchase wheelie bins for the complex and get those recyclables collected at no additional charge, dependent on the area you stay in.
- Get greening
Start your own compost heap by making use of lawn cuttings, food leftovers and vegetable peels. After a few months this can be used to compost your beds – at no additional cost to you.
- Recycling has long-term implications for the environment by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, reducing landfilling of paper and thus a positive effect on climate change.
- Put an effort into recycling
Through recycling efforts, 1.17 million tonne of paper was recovered in 2013 – that is the equivalent of saving landfil space of over 1 403 Olympic-size pools.
- Recycling creates jobs.
Recycling work provides jobs for about 100 000 people in South Africa, many of whom are entrepreneurs and small business owners that rely on sustained volumes of recycled material to earn a living.
- Get your children involved
Get your children involved and don’t be afraid to start small – it all adds up and every bit counts. Just imagine if every child in your daughter or son’s school brought their weekly newspaper in for recycling. That would be almost 1 000 newspapers available at any given point in time. And if you get your children into the habit of recycling, it will be easier the older they get. Ronnie Recycler is making his way across the countryside, visiting schools that currently recycle with Mpact Recycling. To get your school involved and for more details visit www.mpactrecycling.co.za.
