Congratulations to our recent festive poster competition winners! 

The winning entries are pictured on the right. All the winners received family tickets to the Peter Pan pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. After the show our lucky winners got to meet some of the cast and had their photographs taken with them.

Thank you to everyone who entered. The posters were creative and full of great ideas on reducing, reusing and recycling waste at Christmas. 

The Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF for short, is where your mixed household recycling is taken to be sorted. Nottinghamshire has its very own MRF in Mansfield, operated by Veolia. January is always a really busy time at the MRF with all the extra Christmas recycling.

At the MRF, high tech machinery sorts the recycling into different material types. There is also a hardworking team who sort it by hand to remove any incorrect items. The materials are then baled, loaded into lorries and taken to reprocessors where they are used to create new products, many of which can be recycled again.

Did you know that paper and cardboard make up over half of the material processed at the Materials Recovery Facility?

Follow our tips to help us recycle as much as possible:

• Please don’t put any paper or card in a recycling bin if it has food on it, because papermills cannot recycle food contaminated material.
• Wet paper and cardboard is difficult for our sorting machinery to separate from other recyclables, so please keep it dry inside your recycling bin. 
• Wallpaper cannot be recycled. It usually contains fungicides or ink types which are not suitable for recycling. Please put wallpaper in your general waste bin.
• Shredded paper also needs to go in your general waste bin. Like wet paper, it causes problems with our sorting machinery and because shredding cuts the fibres of the paper and cardboard into very short lengths, it is more difficult to turn this into good quality paper/card pulp for recycling into new items.
• Envelopes with windows are accepted for recycling and you do not need to remove the window. Padded envelopes are not suitable for recycling because they have a plastic liner, so please reuse these where possible or place in your general waste bin.
• Wrapping paper or cards that have any glitter or other embellishments attached to them such as ribbons or jewels cannot go in the recycling bin.

Remember to use our free Recycling Checker if you’re not sure if an item can be recycled in Nottinghamshire. 

We’re talking about the 3Rs of waste: reduce, reuse, recycle.

These are the simple but important actions we can take to save natural resources, cut carbon emissions and protect the environment.

Reduce - try to reduce the amount of waste you produce. One way to do this is by choosing items in the supermarket with less packaging or buying loose.

Reuse – use a reusable mug when you're out and about – this will often mean you get a discount off your drink too.

Recycling - make sure that you recycle correctly and don’t let valuable recyclables end up in your general waste bin. 

Now that the decorations have come down, don't forget that your real Christmas tree can still be recycled at any of our recycling centres across Nottinghamshire.

During January and February our recycling centres are all open daily from 8am until 4pm.

Real Christmas trees are shredded to make wood chip paths, mulches or can be recycled into compost at a local facility.