What can I recycle?

Most everyday items can now be recycled, including three-quarters of the contents of your average grocery basket, such as paper and card, glass and plastic bottles and containers and food and drink cans. Furthermore, your local services are constantly being improved to make it easier than ever to do so.

Materials collected in each borough vary, but recycling collections from home are now available for around 80 per cent of Londoners. What can be collected for recycling depends on several things, such as whether reprocessing facilities exist to take the recycled materials, the type of housing being collected from and the availability of funds.

Most common materials

The most common materials collected for recycling are glass, paper and cans. Some London boroughs recycle a broader range of materials at their Reuse and Recycling Centres such as green garden waste, plastic bottles, cardboard, electrical items, textile, 'white goods' - eg fridges and cookers - and batteries including car and household batteries.

You can do more

If you already recycle, you can probably recycle more than you think. Consider the following and ask yourself if you can recycle more

• Do you recycle your glass jars as well as your glass bottles?

• Do you recycle junk mail as well as newspapers?

• What do you do with unwanted cardboard boxes? Many boroughs now collect cardboard in their recycling collections from home

• What do you do with old clothes, sheets and towels? Could you take them to a charity shop for reuse or put them in a street recycling bank for textiles to be recycled, instead of throwing them away?

Follow the links on the left for information about categories of materials that can be recycled.