Putting the emphases on plastic

February 15, 2012 / by admin / Make A Comment / Filed under Swop Shop

HDPE 2 - white or coloured milk, juice or shampoo bottles

Putting the emphases on plastic!

This year at the Recycle Swop Shop we have made a few adjustments on why and how we work with our recycling. We learned from last year that cardboard was A LOT of hard work and with little value on the recycling market. Also cardboard has so many uses in our townships e.g. insulation, compost and compost for earth worm bins.

So we made a decision to put an emphases on plastic. We are now giving 3 tokens for each bag of plastic and 1 token for each bag of glass, tin or cardboard. We have noted an increase in plastic, which was the desired result, and decrease in everything else. We have negotiated a better price with our recycling buy back center, but this has come with some additional refining to our sorting process!!! That process was to sort PET1 into 2 different colours and remove ALL the lids. Hard work?…Yes, well rather tedious to say the least! Note: we already sort 1 PET (polyethylene terephthalate) clear coke, cooldrink or bottled water bottles, 2 HDPE (high density polyethylene) white or coloured milk, juice or shampoo bottles, 4 LDPE (low density polyethylene) most plastic bags and 5 PP (polypropylene).

The next step is to educate and reward the people bringing the recycling to remove lids and sort by colour. Meet Spokazi! She is our volunteer that heads up the team that sort the plastic and over the past 4 months has become such a valued team member. Thank you Spokazi – you do a wonderful job!