- Recycle Week 2024 reaches 7.3 million people and drives missed capture rate down from 70% to 64% for five key recyclables
- Recycle Week 2025: 22nd – 28th September
Recycle Week, the flagship annual event delivered by Recycle Now for 22 years, returns 22-28 September to collaborate with even more NGO’s, businesses, schools, local authorities and community groups and to inspire even more people to recycle.
Aiming to go beyond awareness-raising and drive citizen behaviour change, the evaluation of last year’s Recycle Week shows that the campaign reached an estimated 7.3 million people. Of these, around 2.9 million indicated they have changed their recycling habits due to the campaign. After Recycle Week 2024, Recycle Now found that the missed capture rate for five key recyclables had dropped from 70% to 64% as a result.
Recycle Now says more must be done to create lasting change and bigger impact and is setting its sights even higher in 2025. Craig Stephens, Campaign Manager, WRAP says, “The impact last year’s campaign had in driving down the rate of common household items are binned when they could be recycled was brilliant. This year we want to take that success even further and need even more partners to get more people recycling more efficiently.”
Recycle Now data shows that 90% of UK households are regularly recycling but that 79% of people miss one or more items that could be recycled in their kerbside collection. The main barriers to recycling are uncertainty about what can and cannot be recycled – many people are unsure about which items belong in their recycling bins and doubts about whether recycling is worthwhile – people express scepticism due to concerns about what happens to their recycling once collected.
Recycle Now continues to use behaviour change science to enhance its campaigns and address these barriers. Last year ‘Rescue Me – Recycle’ saw a radical new creative approach developed to resonate with people who engage less in recycling. The campaign used personification to bring to life the plight of the one billion aftershave and perfume bottles, aerosols, plastic trigger spray bottles, yoghurt pots, and toilet roll tubes incorrectly binned every year - giving them human traits, emotions, and personalities and making it harder to cast them aside.
Recycle Now is now calling on the UK’s largest brands, retailers and businesses together with local authorities to play a key role in showing the public that recycling is worthwhile, and a positive personal act in the fight against climate change.
Notes to Editor
- About Recycle Now: For more than twenty years, Recycle Now has encouraged and motivated citizens to recycle more things, more often, from around the home. Using ground-breaking research and behaviour change science, it develops interventions and campaigns to motivate citizens to change their behaviour. Recycle Now is the citizen facing recycling campaign of global environmental NGO WRAP.
- WRAP is a global environmental action NGO catalysing policy makers, businesses and individuals to transform the systems that create our food, textiles and manufactured products. Together these account for nearly 50% of global greenhouse emissions. Our goal is to enable the world to transition from the old take-make-dispose model of production to more sustainable approaches that will radically reduce waste and carbon emissions from everyday products. To do so we examine sustainability challenges through the lens of people’s day-to-day lives and create solutions that can transform entire systems to benefit the planet, nature and people.
- Our work includes: UK Plastics Pact, UK Food & Drink Pact, Textiles 2030 and the campaigns Love Food Hate Waste and Recycle Now. We run Food Waste Action Week and Recycle Week.
- Please contact: [email protected]