By Amy Greenfield
I HAVE a confession to make. For the last two years I’ve been running Awesome Wales zero waste shop with my partner Stuart. Together we have championed plastic free shipping as a way of life, offering refills for wholefoods, cleaning products and beauty essentials.
Not a scrap of plastic in sight.
That is until you look in my lunchbox (hangs head in shame), nestled alongside a homemade sandwich and unwrapped fruit lies a packet of ready salted crisps.
My one plastic covered vice.
Please don’t start hurling stones just yet, as we all have those couple of items in our weekly shop that come in packaging that simply can’t be recycled in our kerbside collection.
So, I’ve come up with a solution, one that will help us all to cut our trash and minimise our carbon footprint too.
Talking trash
In partnership with Terracycle, Awesome Wales zero waste store is launching a new recycling hub in their Cowbridge High Street store this week.
The new recycling area will host collection bins for dozens of hard-to-recycle plastics including crisp packets, toothbrushes, contact lens cases and biscuit wrappers.
These items would normally go into your black bag, destined for incineration.
Instead, they will be sorted and sent away by a team of local volunteers to be remade into useful objects.
A winner for local charities.
What’s more, local charities including Velindre and Welsh Air Ambulance will benefit from a cash donation for every kilo of plastic waste that is collected.
Big brands including Walkers, Pringles, Burt’s Bees and Tassimo pay a fee for the waste that their products create, helping the scheme to grow.
In the last two years, Vale residents have recycled more than 24 tonnes of waste through the Terracycle scheme, conserving precious materials and reducing their carbon footprint too.
For a full list of items that you can recycle at the new hub, visit awesome.wales/recycling.
I hope to see you popping into our new recycling hub soon.
I’ll try to leave you some room in the crisp packets bin.
Amy Greenfield is co-director at Awesome Wales. She runs two zero waste refill shops in Barry and Cowbridge.
