Edinburgh receives recycling boost
February 10, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Edinburgh is clearly a city full of residents with a green-friendly approach. That much was made clear when the council recently revealed a surprisingly high level of demand from the general public for more recycling facilities. It therefore would surely have come as music to the ears of those living in the Scottish capital that they will now be able to have batteries and plastic bottles collected for recycling from their homes, with the former now collected from blue kerbside boxes and the latter from red kerbside boxes.
Residents had previously been forced to travel to selected local shops or major council recycling centres if they wished to recycle their batteries but it isn’t just the council in Edinburgh that has identified battery recycling as one key area to address over the next five to ten years. With just 3% of batteries used in British households currently ending up in recycling plants, councils across the nation are seeking to solve a problem that can at worst lead to harmful chemical leaks that have the potential to damage the environment severely.
The local council in Edinburgh also has high hopes that the plastic bottle recycling scheme will be particularly successful, with around 275,000 tonnes of plastic used on an annual basis in the United Kingdom. This astounding figure equates to around 15 million plastic bottles each day. When you bear in mind that plastic bottles can take around 500 years to decompose in their entirety, the potential problem of not having adequate recycling facilities seems all too clear.
