National Recycling Week South Australia.

South Australian residents are the best recyclers in Australia; mainly due to the South Australian Governments Container Deposit Legislation that places a 10c refund deposit on many beverage containers.

Planet Ark’s National Recycling Week initiative places focus on the benefits of recycling at home, at work and at school across Australia. Adelaide residents however can not only learn about recycling but make money recycling; especially 10 container deposit refund products.

Recycling At Home

Many Adelaide homes have their own bin for storing bottles, cans and cartons they can take to Adelaide recycling depots for the 10c deposit refund. Large green wheelie bins are ideal for this. Once the bin is full, you can separate and count the plastic bottles, glass bottles, cans and milk cartons that you can make money from into separate garbage bags. You’ll be amazed at how many drink containers that qualify you consume in a week.

Recycling At Work

Many Adelaide businesses have installed separate recycling containers, one each for cans, plastic bottles, glass bottles and milk cartons. Social committees often take the initiative to organise these and place the money collected into an end of year party or donate the money to their charity of choice.

Recycling At School

Getting the message about the benefits of recycling to our children is important. Educating children while they’re young will foster good recycling habits as they grow older.
Adelaide SA schools can also run collection bins, encouraging students to bring in their used 10c deposit refund containers, while learning about the benefits recycling has on the environment in the classroom.
Learn more about how to make money for your school by recycling beverage bottles, cans and cartons; it’s a great fundraising activity.

Did You Know – Recycling Facts

• Approximately 1 billion cans end up in landfill dumps each year.
• Aluminium does not ‘degrade’ when recycled, so it can be repeatedly put through the recycling process.
• Each can recycled saves the amount of electricity required to run a TV for 3 hours and 20kg of greenhouse gas emissions.
• One kg of cardboard recycled reduces one kg of greenhouse gas, plus saves trees from being cut down.
• Over 80,000 tonnes of lead acid batteries found in cars and trucks are disposed of each year.
• Glass made recycling glass uses 75% less energy.
• The energy saved by recycling one glass bottle could power a 15 watt low energy bulb for 24 hours.

Recycling is often cheaper than producing the material for the container in the first place; but as important is the saving of our natural resources and greenhouse gas emissions from landfill dumps.