Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 11th April 2024 Issue no. 1109
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With the world's focus firmly fixed on the Covid-19 virus pandemic, maintaining perfect hygiene has been at the forefront of everyone’s minds. However, national waste company BusinessWaste.co.uk notes that while people are following the advice of healthcare officials, the resulting waste may not be doing much good for the planet – and with every single bottle of liquid soap and hand sanitiser being snapped up as soon as they’re unloaded at point of sale, the company reckons there will soon be an extra 10 million empty bottles ending up in already stretched landfill sites in the UK alone.
Plastic bottles are one of the most commonly recycled waste products, but it’s important that they’re recycled correctly. And while this is a simple process, even I, (who thought I knew it all when it came to recycling) wasn’t aware that I should have been removing lids before recycling bottles as they’re of a different grade plastic and will need to be recycled separately – or that the bottle pumps are removed as they are not currently recyclable in the UK!
Didn’t I read somewhere earlier that these are in short supply? Shouldn’t we then, be launching a scheme to deliver them to a central point for return to the manufacturers that need them? Refilling these bottles is a better option though, to reduce the need to manufacture more plastic, which could otherwise end up in a rubbish tip. How often do you see refill packs in mainstream stores these days? No – neither do I… Soap manufacturer Carex has apparently just launched a scheme which aims to get people to reuse their existing soap bottles, by selling refill pouches that can eventually be recycled through local Terracyle collect points, (which can be found online) and I hope this is a success. I also hope we’ll soon see the rise of more ‘zero-waste’ shops, where we can take our own containers and reuse them to stock up on whatever we need for our homes.
“You can also buy bars of soap, which are just as effective at keeping your hands hygienically clean and have the added benefit of often not coming in plastic packaging,” says BusinessWaste.co.uk , “Plus you’re bound to have a stash laying around from years of Christmas gift sets from your nan.”
Yes – I must confess that we’ve dug ours out at home and are gradually (finally!) using up our supply…
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Yours,
30th April 2020