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www.morzinesourcemagazine.com
CAN YOU
recycle that? BY CHLOE HARDY
There’s a lot going on in the recycling world at the moment, and it’s not all good news. While we human-folk are becoming more aware of recycling and minimising waste as a whole, it turns out it’s pretty easy to get it wrong. And then there’s the issue of supply chain transparency throughout the recycling industry, not to mention numerous cases of recycling fraud. But one of the best things we can do if we want recycling to be taken seriously is to make sure we do it properly. We spoke to Dom Turner, owner of local chalet company Skiology, who, in his quest to be more green, sought advice from the local authorities. He's helped us come up with this handy guide to recycling in the Haute Chablais. “As someone who endeavours to run their business sustainably, I was shocked to learn that the green dot frequently found on packaging (the one with the two green arrows circling each other) doesn’t mean that something is recyclable. This lead to a total recycling overhaul in the Skiology household. We began religiously scanning our packaging to make sure we were recycling it correctly. We even contacted the Environmental Representative of the Communauté des Communes de Haut Chablais (our local council) to find out if we could be doing anything more. Once you start following the recycling symbols correctly, you’ll most likely be shocked by how much more you’re putting in the regular, non-recyclable bin. You may even be tempted to keep on putting non-recyclable items in the recycling, just to make yourself feel better. However, doing this means you risk 'contaminating the batch'. In some countries, if you contaminate the batch, that batch goes to landfill, rather than to the recycling plant, as it’s not cost effective to re-sort it. In my experience, the best thing you can do to minimise waste is to reduce your packaging consumption first. At Skiology we do this using the concept of the three Rs:
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Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. The three Rs are in that order for a good reason. Plastic and paper products will degrade the more they’re recycled; for example, a birthday card might be recycled to become a cereal box, which might then be recycled and become a napkin, at which point the fibres will be too short to recycle effectively. So if you can reduce and reuse before you can recycle, less materials will be wasted.
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