NEWS RELEASES
Buy a compost bin and win
6 May 2008
TO CELEBRATE Compost Awareness Week 2008, Recycle Now is offering any resident of Horsham District who buys a compost bin between 4 and 10 May the chance to win fifty GBP of garden centre vouchers to spend on their garden.
Recycle Now is the national recycling campaign for England aimed at encouraging everyone to recycle more things, more often and to understand the positive benefits of doing so.
Created and delivered by WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) on behalf of the Government, Recycle Now was launched in 2004 and supports the achievement of recycling targets – most notably to help increase the national recycling rate to 40% by 2010 (currently at nearly 27%).
Anyone living in Horsham District who places an order from the 4 – 10 May 2008 will be entered into the free prize draw to win £50 of garden centre vouchers, which have been donated by DHL, the logistics company that delivers the bins.
To support the awareness week, Horsham District Council will also be holding an event in Horsham’s Carfax on Friday 9 May from 10am to 2.30pm to offer any residents and others helpful tips and advice on composting.
Compost Awareness Week is designed to encourage everyone to ‘Green up the Environment’.
Home Composting is a simple and cheap way of dealing with up to a third of a typical family’s waste bin, and it is a brilliant way to help the environment.
When organic garden and food waste is sent to landfill, it is crushed beneath large amounts of other household waste. This means there isn’t any oxygen present when it breaks down, so it produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.
By composting at home, waste such as fruit and vegetable peelings can break down in an oxygenated environment so no methane is produced. This also creates a rich fertiliser for the garden which completes the natural cycle and keeps waste out of landfill.
And it’s not just fruit and vegetable peelings – toilet roll tubes, coffee grounds, tea bags, and egg boxes will all add nutrients to the mix. Almost anything organic can be composted, from shredded confidential documents and scrunched up cereal boxes to grass cuttings.
All this waste breaks down naturally to create a free product that can be used to keep plants and gardens looking green and beautiful – and it even helps the soil to retain moisture, which is particularly good news during the hot summer months.
This Compost Awareness Week, BBC presenter Philippa Forrester is backing the campaign to make sure that waste is recycled at home rather than ending up on landfill sites.
She comments:
“With three young children, I’ve never been more aware of the impact we make on the environment and the responsibility of bringing future generations into a world that we can really be proud of.
“Composting at home is just one small step towards making sure that we minimise the amount of waste we create, but if everybody gets involved then it makes a huge difference.”
Since the Recycle Now Home Composting campaign launched, 1.7 million compost bins have been bought – and if for people who don’t compost already, there has never been a better time to start.
For more information please visit www.recyclenow.com/compost or phone 0845 077 0757 for more details.
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CONTACT: Richard Morris, Communications Manager
Email: richard.morris@horsham.gov.uk