What to collect?

Be specific. Recycling can be confusing for many so be clear and specific about the items you want to collect.

In short, ‘mixed recycling’ gets mixed results.

Whilst many household collections will successfully collect a wide range of items from jars and cans to tin foil and aerosols, on-street we’ve found that it’s best to aim for quality over quantity. 

We’ve learnt across our campaigns that you’re likely to collect better quality and more material if you just focus on collecting empty:

  • Plastic bottles

  • Cans

  • Glass

All of these items are widely collected and widely understood as recyclable.

Messaging

Across the campaigns, we’ve tried to make the messaging eye-catching, engaging and playful. 

leeds by example bubble bin recycling on the go plastic bottle can street

To take a playful approach, a Yorkshire dialect was used on the bin messaging: Empty plastic and cans nowt else.

Why not just match household collections?

When people are at home, they have the means to empty, rinse and carefully sort their recycling. Whilst on-the-go, they are likely in a rush and likely to wishfully over-recycle items that cause contamination like dirty plastic packaging, or items that need special waste streams like coffee cups (see coffee cup section).

From a behavioural science perspective, being specific about the items keeps the decision fast and reflexive, and in the ‘system one’ part of the brain. Read more about System One and Two thinking here.

What about paper?

We’d recommend not collecting paper in the same bins as the other items as it breaks down rapidly when combined with liquid from open bottles and cans. This can cause issues with recycling machinery and could lead to the whole bags of recycling being rejected.

The quality of paper is also likely to be low: paper packaging from food outlets is often contaminated with oil, grease or food which means it can’t be recycled anyway.

With this in mind, we’d recommend keeping paper recycling to homes and offices, or in specific settings like train stations to capture newspapers.

What about coffee cups?

Did you know that we bin nearly three billion paper cups every year in the UK, but only around 4% are currently recycled?

We’ve been exploring ways of reducing the use of single use coffee cups, increasing cup recycling schemes and exploring alternatives like reuse systems through projects such as the Square Mile Challenge, Grab Your Cup campaign, the Cup Fund.

Coffee cup recycling has also been included in upcoming policy as DEFRA has confirmed they’ll be introducing mandatory paper cup recycling for businesses from 2024, so cup recycling will be going mainstream in the coming years.

 Our key advice for coffee cup recycling includes: 

  • Positioning – As with recycling bins, coffee cup recycling bins should be positioned next to another bin, ideally a general waste and recycling bin. Bins that are inside managed spaces tend to be a lot less contaminated than bins on streets. However, most takeaway coffees are consumed on-the-go and therefore thrown away in on-street bins, so a combination of bins inside and outside is best.

  • Work with cafes – Bristol Waste, a recipient of the Cup Fund, worked with cafes to adopt a cup bin, which increases ownership and awareness with the cup retailers of the scheme.

  • Build partnerships to help promote and collect and increase the collection volume. Shopping centres, universities, hospitals and offices.

  • Contamination – back up the messaging on the bins with comms that reinforce messages about how to correctly recycle and reduce issues with contamination.

  • Compostables – compostable cups cannot be recycled. When engaging with cafes check if they are selling compostable cups as this will reduce the quality of the material you collect.

If you want the full overview on how to set up cup recycling, check out our full guide here.