Category Archives: Waste and Recycling

The production and disposal of almost anything you buy has an environmental impact. However this impact tends to be somewhere else – out of sight and out of mind. Whenever you buy something new, you are also buying its hidden history of resource extraction and manufacture: all the energy needed to make the item and bring it to you, and all the materials that had to be thrown away during its production. This history tends to amount to much more than the product itself. The amount of waste produced in making paint, for example, is up to ten times the volume of the final can of paint.

This is important because the topic of ‘waste and recycling’ tends to focus on what we do with products when we are finished them. Yet most of the waste we produce as communities is actually created and disposed of ‘upstream’ in the manufacture of the product rather than ’downstream’ at the point of disposal. So reducing waste means taking care in what we consume as well as throwing away less.

The ‘waste hierarchy’ captures these ideas in a simple three word mantra: ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. Every waste material is potentially a new resource for someone else and it is precisely at the level of the local community that hard-to-transport heavy resources are best reused.

Waste and Recycling Ideas

• Buy goods, materials and appliances that are durable. In the long term, this dramatically reduces households’ consumption of goods, and therefore of the energy required to make them.
• Repair furniture, appliances, clothes and building fabric (e.g. windows)
• Replace mains water with rainwater (especially for watering gardens and cleaning cars)
• Install more efficient taps, showers and wet appliances
• Reuse products and materials: eBay, auction houses, car boot sales, jumble sales, reclamation yards and charity shops
• Community composting is an excellent way of turning household waste into a resource that the same households can benefit from.
• Similar to community composting – build a community wormery
• Create a directory of local products made from reclaimed or recycled materials
• Be creative and learn to make items out of old items
• Buy nothing new for a month or even a year!
• Remember to take shopping bags with you if you are going out

Waste and Recycling in Eastleigh Borough

Eastleigh Borough Council have provided some excellent resources for Waste and Recycling in the Eastleigh Borough area. Please use their website to access these resources: http://www.eastleigh.gov.uk/waste-recycling-environment/recycling.aspx

Join the Eastleigh or Southampton Freecycle Group