Grass Roots Recycling - Capital Valley Plastics

Grass Roots Recyling

Creating recycled products is only part of the story: first we have to have the used raw materials we need for manufacturing.

In 2019 we launched a new project to encourage businesses, schools and organisations to get involved in recycling stretchy plastics: waste not currently collected by the local councils.

There has been (and still is) strong desire to get some sort of stretchy plastic (LDPE film) collection scheme organised and with the help of Torfaen council CVP set up a recycling bank with the appropriate signage to show what we can and cannot recycle here at CVP. We wanted to make recycling easy and accessible to our local community.

The bank was emptied once a fortnight on a trial basis and proved extremely successful, with 93% of the plastic collected perfectly recyclable. This showed that communities can make a difference and will recycle plastic with just a small amount of education.

We then broadened the scheme to a local school, again with a high degree of interest and success which led to more schools wanting to get involved.

We developed a range of educational tools which encouraged the children to bring in stretchy plastic waste from home, made more exciting by our offer of cash prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place for the schools that collect the most bags per pupil.

This is now a successful and ongoing scheme which has been rolled out to businesses and organisations across our local area, providing communities across South Wales with drop off points for their stretchy plastic where they can be assured it will be recycled in a sustainable way.

So far, we have managed to collect nearly 14 tonnes of domestic and commercial stretchy plastic waste from our communities. All of it has made into useful products rather than going into landfill.

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