With the battle against plastic waste a hot topic, J&G Environmental are taking steps to remind customers how they can help them help the environment.

The waste disposal and printing supplies company is fully geared up for recycling a wide range of materials with plastics being a main one. This includes a service for plastic film and polythene wrap, of which a report from the organisation WRAP showed 1.2 million tonnes enter the waste stream each year, one third of this coming from commercial, industrial and agricultural sources.

However for J&G, one difficulty in being able to recycle this is being caused by contamination of the containers used to collect the film and wrap. Other plastic items or general waste are regularly being thrown in and to date, the company has been laboriously separating these. However the problem has now reached the stage where they are taking the step of issuing an urgent reminder.

“We endeavour to make all our recycling services as easy as possible for customers – this helps everyone and most importantly the environment,” explains J&G Recycling Manager Darren Fairlie. “There’s no need to worry about separating colour of wrap or film; we just need to ensure that nothing else is added and that everyone is aware of the importance of that. To date we have been dealing with the removal of other items ourselves – a laborious process on a large scale which has ceased to be a viable option. In future we may need to make an additional charge for contaminated bales which we would rather avoid just as we know our customers would. It therefore seems timely to issue a reminder of the need to keep wrap and film recycling containers just for those items.”