Biscuit wrapper recycling

Parishes and Schools recycle more single-use plastics

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School recyclingHere’s What You Can Do.

In partnership with TerraCycle, a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials, Sussex Green Living is now working with over fourteen parishes and schools to divert billions of waste resources from landfills.

Why is Recycling Single-Use Plastic Important?

Plastics are extremely durable and cheap to manufacture, making them almost impossible to overlook for manufacturers when it comes to product design and packaging. But their durability comes at the cost of slow degradation rates in the wild; upwards of 300 to 1000 years.

With about 380 tonnes of it being produced every year, by the time the plastic we have disposed of today begins to degrade the quantity in landfills, oceans and everywhere else will have become totally unmanageable. That is, unless, we can turn the tides.

Bisphenol A has been observed to disrupt physiological levels of sex hormones, negatively affect thyroid hormone gene expression in humans, and cause other detrimental effects. In marine life, issues with plastic entanglement and ingestion have been observed at a broad scale. Read more

recyling drop off

Parishes and Schools Keep Joining in on Our Single-Use Recycling Scheme

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In partnership with TerraCycle, a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials, Sussex Green Living is now working with over twelve parishes and schools to divert billions of waste resources from landfills.

Why is Recycling Single-Use Plastic Important?

Plastics are extremely durable and cheap to manufacture, making them almost impossible to overlook for manufacturers when it comes to product design and packaging. But their durability comes at the cost of slow degradation rates in the wild; upwards of 300 to 1000 years.

With about 380 tonnes of it being produced every year, by the time the plastic we have disposed of today begins to degrade the quantity in landfills, oceans and everywhere else will have become totally unmanageable. That is, unless, we can turn the tides.

Bisphenol A has been observed to disrupt physiological levels of sex hormones, negatively affect thyroid hormone gene expression in humans, and cause other detrimental effects. In marine life, issues with plastic entanglement and ingestion have been observed at a broad scale.

The Differences in Plastic Recycling Types

Read more

Fundraising to expand our single use plastic recycling operation

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Some ‘Wednesday Wombles’ sorting crisp packets pre covid

Bigger and better: Appeal for help to expand our single use plastic recycling operation and deliver a greener Horsham!

After a quiet start to the lockdown on the single use plastic recycling front, we are delighted to say that things are starting to pick up again and we are receiving increasing donations of single use plastics waste resources at the Quaker Meeting House drop off point. This is brilliant news as we want to make sure we’re diverting as much single use plastic household waste away from landfill and incineration, and finding new purposes for these materials through our TerraCycle recycling scheme.

We are extremely lucky to have our small but dedicated team of volunteers (affectionately known as the Wombles!) who throughout the lockdown have continued to sort through the donations on a weekly basis in a socially distanced manner. However as waste resource donations return to pre lockdown levels, SGL is in desperate need of support to expand its recycling capability. To give some indication of the quantities the team are working through, a staggering 120,000 crisp packets have been recycled by our team over the course of the last two years! Once single plastic donations are dropped off at the Quaker Meeting House, these are sorted through by hand by our volunteers, boxed up and sent to a company called TerraCycle who manage the recycling of these hard to recycle materials. Without these volunteers, crisp packets along with lots of other household single use plastic resources such as biscuit and snack wrappers would be discarded in waste bins, which currently are transported to Germany and Holland to be incinerated at significant financial and environmental cost. Read more

Help us in global recycling contest

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Press release – Help Sussex Green Living win prize through ‘liking’ recycling video

Sussex Green Living (SGL) volunteer Joy Carter has won Terracycle’s global #keepOnRecycling contest for her “how-to” film that inspires householders to recycle specific single-use plastics during the lockdown.

The film promotes the free recycling schemes run by SGL and Terracycle to avoid items ending up in landfill or being sent overseas by the Council to be incinerated.

Joy said: “Now that most of us are staying home we are generating a lot more waste than normal and it is an ideal time to learn what to do with items that can’t be put in our recycle bins”.

Help Sussex Green Living Go Global! 

Joy is donating the £80 prize money to the Horsham Community Fridge but has set her sights on the global prize and needs your support. The funds would enable SGL to set up a storage facility for all the recycling they sort through ordinarily on a weekly basis at the Quaker Meeting House.  To help SGL win, please watch, like and share Joy’s film on social media. https://www.facebook.com/SussexGreenLiving/

Carrie Cort, SGL founder, said: “We are delighted that the volume of recycling from the local community has increased so significantly – it shows how many people care about being zero-waste. However, we now need to expand our operation to avoid volunteers taking a bag loads of recycling home to sort through. Please support our film and help us win the Terracycle award”. Read more