Preparing your items to drop off
Once your recycling reaches the main drop off location at our hub at Tendring Primary School, it is sorted into boxes of the same scheme, before shipping them off to Terracycle or their new home.
To ensure we can continue to provide you with this opportunity to recycle, we ask for items to be pre-sorted before you drop them off at your local drop off point. We have limited volunteers boxing items up, and everything is done by hand.
Once you have familiarised yourself with the different schemes by looking through our website, you can use the following ideas to get your recycling prepared for dropping off.
To ensure we can continue to provide you with this opportunity to recycle, we ask for items to be pre-sorted before you drop them off at your local drop off point. We have limited volunteers boxing items up, and everything is done by hand.
Once you have familiarised yourself with the different schemes by looking through our website, you can use the following ideas to get your recycling prepared for dropping off.
Use plastic bread bags to contain your sorted items. We have a bread bag scheme, so these can get recycled with us. Tip them inside out (so crumbs all fall out and don't stick to the items inside), then fill them with one scheme. When the bread bag is full, drop it off to your local point. You will find some schemes don't fill up as quickly, just hang on to that bag if you can and top it up each week with your clean, dry recycling items. This makes the process more efficient, especially when it gets to the final stage of us boxing up at the school.
Use a large packet to contain other items from that scheme. e.g. gather your nut, pretzel & popcorn packets, flatten them (one fold over is fine) and slide inside a large popcorn bag. That's one scheme done.
Flatten crisp packets. Flattened crisp packets take up far less space, if you can train your household to flatten them, they will take up less space, be faster for you to sort and it is easier for us to fullfil the weight to volume ratio of the filled box that Terracycle enforce upon us. We must insist on no funky folding of triangles or knots, we have to undo every single one before we can send them off, due to the risk that they can jam Terracycle's machinery.
Get the household involved. Children can earn their Green Blue Peter badge too.