Marking this year’s Recycle Week, MYGroup is reaffirming its commitment to transforming and reusing every waste item that passes through its leading recycling schemes, reassuring consumers that their efforts will never be wasted on our watch.
Research by Recycle Now indicates that consumer perceptions of the worthwhileness of their recycling efforts have declined in recent years. Consumers are also increasingly unsure what can – or can’t – be recycled and are concerned by the lack of items collected by their local council at the kerbside.
Recycle Now is the citizen-facing recycling campaign of global environmental action NGO, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), with which MYGroup is partnered in voluntary agreements relating to the three most prominent waste challenges – plastics, food and textiles.
Across these three areas, MYGroup provides an end-to-end recycling solution, incorporating state-of-the-art technologies and processes to ensure all waste is recovered and either returned to supply chains for reuse or transformed into new products by the company’s ReFactory arm.
MYGroup is committed to making recycling simple and accessible to all and provides consumer in-store recycling schemes in partnership with leading retailers such as Boots and Tesco (both sponsors of Recycle Week this year), as well as Harrods and Specsavers. These schemes allow the public to conveniently and safely deposit used household plastic items unsuitable for kerbside collections, from used cosmetics, health and beauty items, to blister packs, used glasses and contact lenses.
These schemes have successfully diverted well over 250 tonnes of the public’s plastic waste from landfill or incineration to date, with the majority transformed into the company’s MYboard™ – a material similar in consistency to plywood, used widely for construction, joinery, shop and event fittings, as well as furniture for commercial and community settings, such as schools.
This year’s theme for Recycle Week, ‘Rescue Me – Recycle‘, aims to highlight the missed household waste items that are ultimately recyclable material, but end up in the bin due to the perception that there is no other option. Recycle Now estimates that nearly 80% of UK citizens miss at least one item per household each week that could have been recycled.
Our message on Recycle Week 2024 is simple. Waste is rarely, if ever, “unrecyclable”, whatever your local council may tell you.
While the number and colours of bins at home for different items can be bewildering at the best of times, don’t lose hope or be afraid to look for alternative ways to recycle waste elsewhere. This week and always our promise to consumers is that by recycling through MYGroup’s in-store collections, they can be confident their waste will live again as new material or products, no matter how unlikely it may seem.
Steve Carrie, Group Director at MYGroup
We are delighted that MYGroup is supporting Recycle Week. Recycling is essential to limit the impact what we buy has on the environment. Keeping these materials circulating means we can reduce emissions linked with our weekly shop. Every aerosol, every trigger spray bottle, every plastic pot, perfume bottle and toilet roll tube. Rescue – recycle!
Craig Stephens, Senior Campaign Manager for Recycle Now
About Recycle Now and Recycle Week 2024
For more than twenty years, Recycle Now has encouraged and motivated citizens to recycle more things, more often, from around the home. Using ground-breaking research and behaviour change science, it develops interventions and campaigns to motivate citizens to change their behaviour.
Now in its twenty-first year, Recycle Week is the UK’s biggest celebration of recycling, shining a light on the nation’s recycling habits through activities happening across the UK.
To highlight five items of packaging that commonly go unrecycled, Recycle Now has created a team of characters to bring its campaign to life, asking consumers to ‘Rescue Me – Recycle’.
These ‘condemned containers’ include Dee Dee the deodorant, Rey the plastic trigger spray, Yogi the yoghurt pot, Fitz the perfume bottle and humble Hube – the toilet roll tube. The group will feature on recycling and refuse lorries in parts of the UK, in school education packs and on social media. Life-size characters have been produced to highlight the key message and will feature in media throughout Recycle Week.
Find out more about Recycle Week 2024.
