to tell you that you can now recycle ANYTHING?

[BrewdogMillionaire]

Well maybe not anything, but this company TerraCycle specialises in recycling hard-to-recycle products such as "non-recyclable plastic", crisp/confectionary packets, toothbrushes, even cigarette butts and gum!

They'll send a box and a free shipping label for you to send your rubbish back to them, available here: Recycling Boxes

This scheme is available in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Spain, America, Canada, and many other countries.

Perhaps some of you lovely Mumsnetters can help share the word, and order some boxes of your own for your offices/schools etc. We're patiently awaiting our own box

Amazing, thank you!

But they're not free?

I couldn’t work our from their website where all of the waste that you send to them gets processed. Is it shipped halfway around the world? And how much energy does recycling these hard to recycle items consume?

Recycling is ok but the real solution is not producing these things in the first place. It sounds like the companies sponsoring this initiative might be doing it purely for the green credentials - they will be able to claim that their products are recyclable and therefore “green” but this might be far from the reality if the process is very energy intensive.

No problem HBStowe, and FYI 'Outwith' is definitely a word...but only for those who have lived in Scotland

Not all of the schemes are free - some of them are drop-off schemes around the country (e.g. Colgate ) but yes some of them are paid.

Ideally, yes the focus would be on 'Reduce' rather than 'Recycle'. But realistically not everyone will do that.

This is a link to the free schemes Free Schemes

I'm not entirely sure where all of the boxes go. I know that they are based in the USA, but I don't know whether they also have recycling centres within the UK as well. This is obviously an issue.