Rubbish and Recycling

Recycling and rubbish collection days

Islington has reorganised its recycling and rubbish collections. If you live in a street property, all your green box recycling, kitchen waste, garden waste and refuse is now collected on the same day.

To find out your new collection day, click on Find My Nearest under Do it online.

Keeping Islington Clean

The rubbish and recycling pages aim to help you to do your bit, both in terms of keeping the borough clean and healthy for all who live, work and visit here, and being environmentally friendly and keeping Islington sustainable.

There is information here on rubbish and recycling collections and the recycling centre locations, composting and recycling for businesses. There are details on when collections take place and on what to recycle, as well as guidance on how to recycle.

For more information, click on the links under the main navigation list on the left side of this page.

Why Recycle?

• Efficiency: The items you recycle (paper, glass, cans, etc) are valuable resources and can be made into something useful. They are not ‘rubbish’.

• Reduces the demand for raw materials: Recycling reduces the amount of raw material, such as trees, and energy used to create new goods and products. There are many products, identified by the recycling arrows logo, which tell us that a product contains a certain amount of recycled material.

• Recycling creates local jobs as new systems are created to handle recycled material. In addition, buying recycled goods gives birth to new industries and products, which in turn create new jobs.

• Environmental issues: Recycling helps to ensure that our children don’t inherit environmental problems. It reduces the greenhouse gases, such as methane, that cause global warming and the leaking of dangerous chemicals into the soil and water table.

• Reduced landfill: There are already over 1,500 landfill sites currently in operation, each one taking in an average of nearly 80,000 tonnes of rubbish each year. The UK is creating 3% more rubbish each year, where is it all going to go?

• Costs: As landfill becomes rarer and more expensive, recycling becomes a far cheaper way of dealing with Islington’s waste by reducing the amount of what is described as ‘rubbish’ sent to landfill.

Facts and Figures

• 60% of your bin can be recycled.

• The average annual increase in municipal waste from 2000/01 to 2004/05 was 1.5%.

• In London, 71% of household waste was put in landfill, 20% was incinerated and 9% was recycled in 2000.

• Each UK household produces over one tonne of rubbish annually.

• Did you know that every plastic bag buried in landfill takes 500 years to decay? We use over 150 million plastic bags each week.

• Islington was one of the few councils to successfully reach its government recycling target of 18% in 2005/06. Islington had a recycling rate of 18.3% in 2005/06 and had the most improved recycling rate in London. The latest recycling rate for Islington was 26% in January 2007.

The Three Rs

In order to improve the environment in which we live we recommend that you consider the 3Rs of recycling:

Reduce the waste that you produce. For instance, just think about how much material you throw away when returning from a trip to a supermarket. When you buy your fruit and vegetables choose loose rather than pre-packaged. Photocopy on both sides of a piece of paper – it could cut your paper consumption at work by half. Remember to buy recycled products where possible, as this is far more environmentally friendly and helps create viable markets for more recycled products. You also get as good a quality product as from one made from virgin material.

Re-use products or buy a product that can be reused. Re-use your plastic shopping bags – take one of your old ones the next time you go shopping or ask for a ‘bag for life’. Instead of throwing paper away, why not re-use it if it has only been written on or printed on one side as scrap paper. It can come in useful for shopping lists, reminders or be used as a note for someone.

Recycle useful materials. There is a clear difference between useful material to be recycled and what can truly be described as rubbish. Recycling your cans, paper, bottles and jars will save three million tonnes of rubbish a year. You could also get a composter and make compost for the garden from organic household waste.