Zero Waste Week, EU Glass Recycling & The Lego Group - September 2015 Recycling News

The recycling world is a fast paced industry and as you have hopefully noticed, monthly blog articles have been posted which keep up to date with recent events and news over that month. September is no exception and it has been a successful month when it comes to recycling and being sustainable. Zero Waste Week At the beginning of the month the national zero waste week was held from 7 – 13^th for the eighth year running. This is predominantly a social media campaign which encourages individuals and organisations to reduce waste sent to landfills. The theme of this year was ‘reuse – stop wasting money by saving resources’. This year the campaign saw significant growth; from what is usually a national UK based week, this expanded to draw in international participants from across the world, including individuals from Poland, Mexico, Australia and more. In the UK numerous county councils got involved creating new ways to reuse and reduce household waste and increasing recycling rates. Overall the campaign was a success and proof that social media can encourage a sustainable life. The hashtag used for the campaign, #ZeroWasteWeek was trending numerous times during the week. Lego’s Steps towards Zero Waste Whilst everyone will have heard of the Lego Group, what you don’t know is that they are a hugely sustainable organisation and this is going to improve in the coming years. They achieved 90% recycling rates from their production facilities in 2013 and have improved their energy efficiency by 30% since 2008. The organisation is investing $150 million to achieve 2030 goals of researching, developing and applying new, sustainable, raw materials to manufacture Lego blocks and their packaging. In September the organisation announced the hiring of the first of an additional 100-plus specialists brought on board to try and achieve these targets. Lego have already reduced the size of the packaging boxes which saves on average 6,000 tons of cardboard each year. Each of the boxes also consist of 75% recycled content and carry the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo which shows that wood based packaging comes from a sustainable source. EU Glass Recycling Rate Hit 73% The European Container Glass Federation (FEVE) published data in September showing that the EU have reached 73% glass recycling for the first time! Over 25 billion glass containers continued to be recycled in a bottle to bottle closed loop, making glass a model of the circular economy. With Sweden, Belgium and Germany being some of the best performers and Italy and Malta improving on previous years. These increased recycling efforts make Europe the continent with the highest glass recycling rates in the world!