Every week the refuse collectors pick up tonnes of household waste, most of which is tipped into landfill sites. Some of the contents will decompose safely, some of it will eventually poison the area around it, and some of it won't decompose at all. In any case, we are filling sections of our country with rubbish, instead making use of it.

Recycling these materials would result in the use of less raw (virgin) materials, such as wood, metal, and glass (the main constituent is sand), and actually reduces costs, in both money and energy terms.

Recycling is one of the simplest things we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. Many materials which would normally be dumped in a landfill site, adding to the damage to the environment, can now be recycled. These include, glass, metal, textiles, paper, plastics, cardboard and organic materials such as kitchen and garden waste.

How to recycle your waste

Many local authorities in the UK now offer kerbsize recycling boxes, collecting materials for recycling either once a week, or once a fortnight. Most of the schemes collect paper and magazines, tin, aluminium, and glass, and some collect organic kitchen waste, cardboard, and some plastics, such as milk bottles.

If you have a garden, you can recycle kitchen waste yourself by starting a compost bin or wormery - this breaks down into fertiliser you can use on your garden (you can even buy recycled compost bins!).

If your local authority does not offer a kerbside recycling service, the easiest way to recycle is to separate materials you wish to recycle into their own designated bins, so you'd have a bin for glass, a bin for paper, a bin for kitchen waste etc. There should be a recycling centre near you - quite often there will be a bottle bank and newpaper bank in your local supermarkets' car park, and on the outskirts of most towns there will be a recycling centre where you can put plastics (usually only bottles), cardboard, metal and organic waste, as well as glass and paper.

Waste that you cannot recycle at home, but you take to a recycling centre, is separated out and taken to a company that is able to recycle it into something usable. Most local authorities have a list of recycling centres in their area - many of these are available online. Plastic is currently quite hard to recycle due to the vast number of different types and the inability to be able to distinguish between them. Products manufactured from recycled waste include:

• Horse bedding - made from cardboard
• Glass bottles and jars, alternative gravel - made from glass
• Compost and Fertiliser - made from organic/garden waste
• Metal cans - made from used cans
• Cat litter, eggboxes, toilet and kitchen paper - made from paper
• Refuse sacks, car parts, fleece clothing, bottles - made from plastic (mainly bottles)
• Clothing, wiping/polishing cloths, furniture stuffing - made from waste textiles

You can reduce waste further by:

• Choosing products which are made or packaged with recycled or recyclable materials
• Buying in bulk, which reduces packaging waste
• Not using one-trip supermarket plastic bags - use long lasting cloth bags instead
• At work, not using disposable plastic or paper cups - use a ceramic mug instead (and suggest to your colleagues that perhaps they should too!)
• Suggesting to manufacturers and store managers that they should be making or buying products with recycled or recyclable materials

Click here to view businesses selling products made from recycled materials