Pendle News Room

Leader of Pendle Council, Councillor Mohammed Iqbal said:

“This is the good news we’ve been waiting for!” 

Pendle’s recycling goes to Lancashire County Council’s recycling plant at Leyland which has been adapted to take the additional plastic items from 1st October.

“The theme for this year’s Recycle Week is Recycling - it’s in our own hands and local people have been wanting to do their bit and recycle more plastic,” he said.

Councillor David Clegg, who represents Pendle on the Lancashire Waste Partnership agreed, saying:

“Pendle residents can play a big part in reducing the amount of waste going to landfill.”

The additional plastic items including empty yoghurt pots, food tubs and trays will be recycled and find new uses such as food packaging, industrial pipes and fibre products including duvets, pillows and car roof linings.

“The colour of your plastic bottles and plastic pots, tubs and trays does not matter,” explained Pendle Council’s Waste and Recycling Co-ordinator Carole Taylor.

It is easy to see whether the plastic is recyclable by checking the number stamped onto it.

"Anything with a number 1, 2 or 5 within the recycling triangle should go into your brown bin," said Carole.

 “It helps to give items a quick rinse and make sure items are loose so please DON’T put them in a plastic bag!

“Plastic bags hide genuine recyclable items from the optical sorters used and this can lead to an entire load being rejected and sent to landfill instead of being recycled,” she warned.
Details on what you can and can’t recycle, including the new plastics Pendle Council will be collecting for recycling are on www.pendle.gov.uk/brownbin

New plastic items for recycling include: 

•    Pots, such as yoghurt and soup containers
•    Tubs, such as margarine and ice cream tubs
•    Food trays and punnets such as meat trays, fruit and veg trays (remove any plastic film or wrapping and any soft absorbent pads at the bottom of trays first and put these in the
     general rubbish)
•    Chocolate and biscuit tubs and trays
•    Solid lids on pots tubs and trays
•    Other clear plastic packaging such as empty fruit punnets 
•    Plant pots

“The next brown bin collections in Pendle are after 1 October so local people can start putting clean plastic food pots, tubs and trays in their recycling bin now,” said Carole.

“Simply check the list of plastic we can now take and put them in your brown bin along with your clean empty plastic bottles, cans, tins, glass bottles and jars,” she said.
Councillor Iqbal added:

“Recycling more will play a part in a range of actions we are taking following our declaration of a climate emergency in Pendle this year,” he stated.

“Together we can make a difference by tackling the environmental crisis which is affecting us locally, nationally and globally.

“Areas like Pendle can help the UK meet its target of recycling half the country’s waste by the end of 2020,” he said.

Latest figures show that less than half our waste - 45.7% - is being recycled in Lancashire.

County Councillor Cosima Towneley, chair of the Lancashire Waste Partnership, said: 
"There's an increasingly strong demand from people to reduce waste and I'm pleased that residents of Lancashire will be able to add pots, tubs and trays to their plastic recycling.

"This is an opportunity for us all to check that we're doing all we can to recycle, and that we're putting the right things in the right bin,” she added.