Loughborough and Charnwood celebrate Recycle Now Week

The first week of June is Recycle Now Week in Loughborough and Charnwood and to celebrate the event the local councils have organized a series of events promoting the use of reusable shopping bags. The events will take place at local supermarkets in the area.

Charnwood Borough Council will use the week to highlight the “Just One More Thing” campaign. The Council plans to educate consumers about the impact they can have on the environment merely by reducing the number of plastic carrier bags they use on every trip to the supermarket.

In the UK, it is estimated that the average person consumes 167 plastic bags every year. Supermarkets across the country distribute an estimated 13,000,000,000 bags as a result annually. Since plastic bags can take up to a thousand years to break down in a landfill, they are a huge burden on the environment.

Although residents of Charnwood have achieved good recycling rates, the campaign asks them to think about “just one more thing,” and that thing is recycling old plastic bags and switching to reusable bags in the future.

Kath Kay, Waste Policy Manager at Charnwood Borough Council, said: “Single use carrier bags, although not a bulky part of an individual’s household waste, are collectively a major non-biodegradable part of the household waste sent to landfill.

“Reducing the use of these bags by opting for reusable shopping bags is good for the environment. Using reusable bags reduces pollution and our dependence on finite resources such as oil.”