Find out what your council actually recycles
Ten minutes on their website. Most people are wrong about at least three things, in both directions.
The BeingKind editorsPublished How this is written
Why it lands
Recycling rules are local, unintuitive and almost never read, so most households are simultaneously binning things that are collected and contaminating loads with things that are not. Contamination is the expensive failure: one wrong item can send an entire load to landfill, which makes a confident guess worse than no effort. This is the least romantic thing in this library and one of the few where ten minutes of reading genuinely changes the outcome.
How
Search your council name and "what goes in which bin" and read the actual list rather than a general guide. Check the three that catch everybody: lids, sleeves on plastic pots, and anything with food on it. Write the answer on a card and put it above the bin, because the knowledge is useless at the moment of throwing if it lives in your memory.
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