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Recycle your Christmas Waste

Christmas Trees

Christmas Trees can be placed along with garden waste at the main Civic Amenity Sites both at Lynnbottom and at the two weekend sites at Afton and Forest Road. For further information on opening hours please click here.

The benefits of recycling

Once sent for recycling, all Christmas trees are composted and used by a number of farms on the Island meaning that the benefits of recycling your tree are two fold: you are helping to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill sites and you’re helping local farmers. Throwing waste into landfill costs local authorities dearly, which subsequently means a cost to taxpayers.

In addition to the Christmas tree recycling, don’t forget you can also recycle a wide range of material through the regular kerbside black box collection scheme, which is available for every household on the Island to participate in.

Electrical Items

A recent survey suggests that only a third of us recycle electrical appliances that we’ve replaced, 10 per cent of us put them straight in the bin, but recycling is easier than ever! You can recycle old electrical equipment at any of the household waste recycling centres, so when your kettle’s run out of steam or it’s game over for your playstation, don’t bin it, bring it!

As we try to make space for all our new Christmas presents, the black sacks start to pile up – but before you give the refuse collectors a post Christmas workout check out our waste A-Z to see if your unwanted items could be put to better use. For how, what, where, why and when to recycle visit our website: www.iwight.com/waste.

Christmas Cards

Now that the festive season is over, you can recycle your old Christmas cards thanks to the Woodland Trust, who are working in conjunction with Marks & Spencer. Recycling facilities are also in place at Tesco in Ryde and at several Island Primary Schools.

Every year in the UK we send 1.5 billion Christmas cards to each other - that is the equivalent of 200,000 trees!!

Recycling Christmas cards is a simple way everyone can cut down on their festive waste and make a positive contribution to tackling climate change. Recycling 93 million cards in this way last year saved 2,400 tonnes of CO2, when compared to making brand new cardboard boxes. That’s the same impact as taking over 700 cars off the road or avoiding over 100 flights around the globe.

So that’s why, this festive season on the Island, M&S have teamed up with the Woodland Trust to try and recycle 100 million Christmas cards - an even bigger target than last year’s. If we hit this target and recycle just under 7% of the UK’s cards this year, we’ll raise enough funds to plant 22,000 trees or a forest the size of 44 football pitches! And that’s on top of the 15,000 trees that the recycled cards are equivalent to.

Woodland Trust card recycling boxes can be found within the Marks & Spencer store in Newport. Christmas card recycling boxes can also be found instore at Tesco in Ryde from 2 – 31 January. Alternatively if you tend to shop with Tesco online, simply hand your old Christmas cards to your Tesco.com delivery driver who will return them to the store for recycling.

For those Islanders who are unable to get to Ryde or Newport, the Isle of Wight Council have arranged with our Contractor Island Waste Services Ltd, to set up collection points at several Primary Schools across the Island. Please click here to view the list of primary schools participating in the Christmas card recycling scheme for 2010.

What happens to the cards?

Christmas Cards can be taken to Tesco in Ryde, Marks & Spencer in Newport and various Primary Schools across the Island throughout January (if they are in a plastic bag please do not tie this shut, we are recommending that the schools use cardboard boxes for the card collection). After the lorries have delivered new stock to the stores, the cards are loaded on to the empty lorries and taken back to the store's distribution centres. The cards are collected from the centres by Severnside for M&S.

Once at the recycling plant the cards will be sorted into high and low grades. High grades are predominantly white without glitter and foil which means that when recycled they can be used for toilet tissue, kitchen roll, etc. Low grade cards are used for toilet roll inners, packaging materials and corrugated card.

After the cards have been sorted and baled they will be taken to the mill where they will be reduced to individual fibres during the pulping process. Ink particles, coatings etc are separated out. The pulp is then sent through a number of chemical, heat and mechanical processes to further improve quality. Finally the raw pulp is rolled and layered to make huge paper reels – ready to go off and be reused.

All cards recycled by Severnside are recycled in the UK and 17 trees are saved for every tonne of paper recycled.

For further information on recycling your festive waste please refer to the Quick Links below.