Bins - what can I put in them?
Brown bin
Put in your brown bin:
Foil
Lots of our residents are still putting aluminium foil into their general waste bin when it can be recycled instead.
We need more people to recycle their foil, to reduce high cost and carbon emissions involved in making it from scratch, and to reduce the cost of it going to landfill.
You can put foil trays and containers into your brown bin - just rinse your empty foil containers and make sure there are no large pieces of food stuck to the sides.
And if you have sheets of foil, just scrumple them up into a ball.
Do the foil scrunch test - if your foil stays scrunched, you can recycle it. If it doesn't, you need to put it in your grey waste bin.
Aluminium can be recycled again and again and made into food, drink and aerosol cans and even used to make engine blocks to make cars run.
Plastic, Glass and Metals
Anything plastic with a number 1, 2 or 5 in the recycling triangle can go into your brown bin, no matter what shape or colour it is. Just make sure you rinse it out so there's no food left inside.
- Type 1 (PET) - clear or coloured bottles of soft drink or toiletries and trays for some pre-packed food
- Type 2 (HDPE) - softer plastic used for the likes of supermarket bottles of milk
- Type 5 (PP) - tubs and pots which contain foods like margarine, yoghurt or sweets
Not all plastic is labelled with one of these types. You can still put these things in, even if they aren't labelled:
- Plastic
- Glass bottles
- Glass jars
- Food tins
- Drink cans
- Empty aerosol cans
- Metal biscuit and sweet tins
- Metal bottle caps and lids
- Plastic bottles, including, for example, shampoo and detergent bottles
- Plastic lids (either on or off the bottles)
- Pots (e.g. yoghurt, soup)
- Plastic lids, as long as they are firm plastic and not plastic film
- Tubs (e.g. margarine, ice cream)
- Trays and punnets (for example, raw meat or ham trays; take-away trays; fruit and veg). Remove any film lids, film wrapping, and absorbent pads in the bottom of the trays, and put these in your general rubbish
- Chocolate and biscuit tubs and trays
- Other clear plastic packaging
- Plant pots
The item I want to recycle isn't in this list
For information about where to recycle things that you can't put into your brown bin, check the RecycleNow website
Do not put in your brown bin:
- Plastic bags
- Types 3 (PVC) and 4 (LDPE) - plastic film off ready meals and plastic carrier bags
- Type 6 (polystyrene) - widey used packaging material, but which cannot easily be reformed
- Type 7 (blended) - includes milk and juice cartons, which are a complex mix of materials that are difficult to separate
- Paper and card
- Cat food pouches
- Crisp packets
- Hard plastics - children's toys and other similar items can be taken to a Household Waste Recycling Site
- Paint tins or tubs - these can be recycled using the Community Repaint scheme
- Any other metal
Batteries
We can now take batteries as part of our recycling collections.