Recycling For 20 Years

18 September 2012, 11:26 | Updated: 18 September 2012, 11:38

People in Milton Keynes are being thanked for recycling their rubbish, twenty years after kerbside recycling started in MK.

When Milton Keynes' recycling service began in September 1992, it was the first in the UK to offer door-to-door recycling services for everyone.

It came about following a ground-breaking pilot scheme set up two years before that, which required local people to use blue and red boxes to sort their recyclable waste. 

Over the last twenty years, Milton Keynes' recycling service is credited with having saved more than 550,000 tonnes of waste going to landfill.

When the scheme started, around 4% of waste was recycled in Milton Keynes.  A figure which now stands at almost 56%.

The last ten years have seen the introduction of pink recycling sacks, blue boxes for glass and green bins for organic waste.  Waste batteries are now also collected.

Cllr David Hopkins, Milton Keynes Council’s Cabinet Member for Environment and Waste, said: “We would like to express our thanks to the residents of Milton Keynes for embracing recycling so enthusiastically over the past 20 years, saving both the environment and costs to the taxpayer. With their cooperation we’ve achieved a fantastic recycling rate and have a number of plans in the pipeline to increase this further in the future.”

Paul Rowland, Regional Operations Manager for Viridor, said: “Milton Keynes Council has been a pioneer in developing effective household recycling services and their long-term environmental vision, together with local residents’ enthusiasm for recycling, have made it such a success story. We’re proud of being part of these achievements by transforming the borough’s commingled recyclables into high quality materials ready to be reprocessed into new products and packaging.”