Reduce, reuse, recycle

Reduce, reuse and recycle are three concepts that promote sustainable living. They help decrease the amount of waste we throw away and that ends up in refuse.

You can make many changes in your daily life to reduce the amount of waste you produce, and live more sustainably.

Find out about 30 steps to another way on the Another Way website.

Reduce the amount of waste you produce

Everything we produce and consume has an impact on the environment in some way. Making careful decisions about what we buy can have a huge impact.  Cutting waste is the best way to help the environment. A few key changes you could make are

• Reduce packaging of products you buy
• Shop greener, for example from second hand shops
• Reduce food waste by meal planning and composting kitchen waste.
  See our page on food waste digesters for more information on composting food waste.

Reuse items as much as you can before replacing them

Many items found around the home have different purposes. If we reuse items we avoid disposing of them.

• save glass jars to use for storage
• use reusable coffee/tea/water cups/bottles and shopping bags
• reuse envelopes and other packaging to send letters or parcels instead of buying new

Re-using items may look like repairing them instead of replacing them. There are numerous repair café’s in Eden that you can access. Here you can fix things from electricals, textiles, electronics, mechanical goods and more.

So not only do we reduce waste by reusing items we can save money too.

Recycle items whenever possible

We should be recycling a great amount of the waste that ends up in refuse. We provide kerbside recycling collections fortnightly. You can also bring recycling to recycling centres in locations across the district. This allows residents to recycle as much of their waste as possible.

When recycling it is important to recycle correctly to avoid contamination of recyclables. Contamination occurs when you mix unclean or incorrect items in clean recycling.

See the recycling and waste A to Z for guidance on waste, reuse and recycling of different items.

See list of recycling centres in Eden to find your local recycling centre.