Comber residents are being given helpful hints to watch their ‘wastelines’ this Christmas and help reduce the 85,000 tonnes of rubbish produced by Northern Ireland homes over the festive period.
Ards Borough Council is urging local people to pay attention to their rubbish as Christmas approaches and increased amounts of waste are generated, ripe for recycling through blue and brown bins, recycling centres and bottle banks.
Christmas cards can be recycled through blue bins – and we send more than 4,300 cards and parcels each day at this time of year, twice as many as normal!
Cardboard packaging, with any plastic removed, can also be put into blue bins.
If you have a real tree, it can be brought to a recycling centre where it can be turned into valuable compost – instead of being thrown away and generating an extra 320 tonnes of rubbish for landfill.
And those extra 20 million bottles and glass containers and 13 million drink cans which are used over the Christmas period, can be brought to a recycling centre or bottle bank (in the case of glass) or put into blue bins (for food and drink cans).
Wrapping paper, on the other hand, is a definite ‘no’ for recycling through blue bins, so it’s also important to try and cut down on the amount of waste we produce in the first place, as Clive Catterson, Waste Awareness Officer with the Council, explains:
“We all have a part to play in reducing and re-using and while it’s a year-long activity, whether that means using a ‘bag for life’ or choosing to buy products with a minimal amount of packaging, at Christmas we can do even more,” said Clive. “Wrapping paper is a good example. Over the next number of weeks we’ll use enough to cover 500 football parks and most of it simply gets thrown away and needlessly goes to landfill. Putting presents in bags which can be re-used helps reduce this problem, or avoiding wrapping all the large boxes for toys, can make a real difference to the amount of waste we generate in the first place”.
And if you don’t have a blue or a brown bin? Simply order one – or both. They’re free of charge, delivered to your home and collected every fortnight. There are also seven recycling centres in Ards, located at:
Glen Link, Comber
North Road, Newtownards
Moss Road, Ballygowan
Railway Street, Donaghadee
Parsonage Road, Kircubbin
Moss Road, Millisle, and
Coach Road, Portaferry
And the Council has already introduced 6 new bottle banks with a further 9 due to be put in place early in 2007 across the Ards to make it even more convenient to recycle glass bottles and jars.
If anyone would like to order a blue or brown bin or to know more about recycling in general, contact Clive Catterson, Waste Awareness Officer on 028 9182 4024.
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Submitted by The Editor on Tue, 2006-12-19 16:56.
