Woman holding recycling box.

Taking Action this Recycle Week

To celebrate Recycle Week, let’s put reuse and recycling to the forefront of national conversation.

This October, Recycle Week returns with the theme ‘Let’s Get Real’, focusing on challenging perceptions and myths around recycling, as well as seeking to improve recycling behaviours. Between the 17th and 23rd October, the event’s organiser WRAP is calling on businesses, stakeholders, and the media to come together to encourage everyone to recycle more of the right things, more often.

Last year’s Recycle Week was the most successful to date, with thousands taking part, including BRITA, helping to create a huge splash with over 29 million digital impressions. The campaign had a positive impact on public perceptions, with 82% of people saying they had changed their recycling habits as a result of seeing Recycle Week’s content. This year there is a specific focus on educating the public on what materials are recyclable, and how they can be disposed of properly to ensure they can be recycled. Simple tips laid out in the WRAP guide, such as cleaning packaging and removing non-recyclable elements will be front and centre of the campaign, as well as reminders that every item recycled makes a difference.

A person crushing a plastic water bottle.

Plastic waste

Recycle Week’s call to action is now more important than ever, given globally we’re churning out over 380 million tonnes of plastic a year according to the BBC, much of which ends up polluting our natural environment. In the UK, findings from the Big Plastic Count this summer revealed that only 29% of our waste is recycled, most of which is done overseas, whilst shockingly the vast majority ends up incinerated or buried in landfill. We know that recycling has an important role to play in waste management, however, the quantity of waste being produced and not recycled in the UK suggests we also need to prioritise the waste hierarchy. BRITA supports the idea that as a first port of call we should be producing less waste as well as reusing materials as much as possible, before turning to recycling.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle sign

Our reduce and reuse commitment

BRITA wants to tackle this issue head on, and we’re committed to supporting a more sustainable, more circular economy, which reduces waste and encourages reuse and recycling. Of the 13.5bn plastic bottles produced in the UK annually, 5.5bn are not recycled, highlighting the importance of cutting down on our plastic production. Our products, which provide a sustainable alternative to bottled water and are helping to replace billions of unnecessary plastic bottles, are also becoming more sustainable themselves. By 2025 our packaging will contain no virgin plastics and will be made of 100% recyclable material, all part of ensuring that recycling sits at the heart of our business model going forward. Our Cartridge Recycling Programme also remains core to our business model with over 1.4 million cartridges sold each year in the UK being recycled. Find out where to recycle your BRITA cartridges here.

Joanna Lumley holding a newspaper with a load of waste in the background.

How you can make a difference this Recycle Week

Recycle Week presents a crucial opportunity to bring reuse and recycling to the forefront of national conversation and highlight the important role it plays in reducing the amount of waste and pollution we produce. Recycle Week is also about providing resources so that everyone can do their bit. BRITA wants to help support people in using less and embed habits like reuse into our everyday lives. So, this Recycle Week, why not take a look at our 10 Steps to Greening Good and chose one or two small  changes to start with such as remembering a reusable shopping bag and ditching habits like buying plastic water bottles, which make a huge difference in cutting down waste.

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