So far 7,200 shops, schools, colleges, community groups, charities, places of work and individuals across the UK have set up collecting boxes for used crisp and snack packets.
Why? Because in the UK we open six billion packets a year and, until now, they haven’t been recycled. Forget the litter, that’s another bad story, but at best the packets have just been thrown into bins to be taken somewhere else.
And that’s the problem, there is no somewhere else; there’s only here, the small planet where we live! Already it’s getting choked with our rubbish. And all the time we have to keep finding more new raw materials to make more packets as well. Walkers Crisps alone produce 11 million packets a day!
At the moment there is only one collection point in the whole area of the New Forest East constituency, and just two in New Forest West. Wouldn’t it be great if there were more!
All that is needed is for volunteers to set up collection boxes and wait for the crisp packets to be dropped in. Thousands of local munchers would welcome a place to recycle their packets, and hopefully thousands more would pick up the habit when it was easy to do so.
Collectors get the packets taken away for free when they have got 2kg of them, and can earn points to raise money for good local causes. Everyone’s a winner!
The simple collection scheme is run by TerraCycle, a recycling company running volunteer-based collections of various types of waste that are used to make new products.
You can find out where your nearest drop-off point is, and how easy it is to set up a collection point, at terracycle.co.uk/en-GB/brigades/crisppacket, or link to it quickly from walkers.co.uk/recycle.