Completed petition Don't Fill Landfill!
We call on the National Assembly for Wales to urge the Welsh Government to either issue new black wheelie bin stickers (see example included*) or printed wheelie bins which urge households across Wales to consider the bin’s contents before leaving it on the kerbside for collection.
We feel that by explicitly describing the bin as a ‘landfill’ bin, this will serve to reinforce consideration for the items contained within it. We have included some factual information about the amount of time certain everyday items will stay in landfill if not recycled. We think this is very powerful and may improve Wales’ commitment to recycle and therefore meet our targets for the future.
Ultimately, we want to encourage people to recycle more as well as help to reduce the amount of recyclable goods that end up in landfill.
*The graphic was submitted as part of the petition and is available in English only.
More details
My name is Claire Perrin and I am a teacher at Celtic English Academy. At the start of this term, I started a class project on recycling and encouraged my 10 students to identify the possible options residents have in the capital. We also discovered that Wales is exceeding its commitment to reduce landfill by 2025 and is leading the rest of the U.K in terms of improving access to recycling centres and household collections in general.
However, my students began to notice that many residents weren’t recycling correctly. We have included photographic examples of green recycle bags in black wheelie bins, food in kerbside green and black bags and recyclable items in black bags. We held class discussions about the possible reasons behind these errors. We also conducted a survey which asked people to identify recyclable goods from the following list:
pet food pouches; personal hygiene items; Aluminium sheets; take away trays; magazines; crisp packets; egg boxes; plastic carrier bags; clothing
We found that a lot of people simply did not know which items could be recycled. We also discovered that people did not contemplate how long landfill items would take to biodegrade. When we informed them, they were shocked and wanted to do more to recycle. This encouraged us to come up with a possible solution to the amount of items placed incorrectly in black/green bags which could be rolled out across Wales, thus encouraging people to take more responsibility for their waste management and in the process, preventing recyclable items from going straight to landfill.
This petition was considered by the Petitions Committee
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