Sawbridgeworth residents will be able to recycle their plastic bags and wrapping as part of their usual recycling. Credit: Mario Viani via Shutterstock.

The town of Sawbridgeworth in the UK has launched an expansion of a plastic recycling trial, enabling approximately 2,000 households in the area to recycle plastic bags and wrapping as part of their regular recycling routines.  

This move follows the initial pilot in Knebworth, England, which began in October last year. 

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The trial is a collaboration between the North Herts and East Herts councils and is set to include kerbside recycling of soft plastics under their new joint waste contract.  

This latest pilot expansion will commence next year, with participating households receiving special blue bags for their soft plastic waste. 

Households in the current trial have been provided with these blue bags to collect various types of plastic packaging such as crisp packets, confectionery wrappers, and bubble wrap.  

Detailed instructions have been issued to ensure the correct disposal and collection of these materials, which are to be tied securely and placed atop other recyclables in the blue-lidded bins. 

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East Herts Council Environmental Sustainability executive member and councillor Tim Hoskin said: “We are so pleased to be joining North Herts in this trial. Although plastic bags and wrapping don’t weigh that much, early results from participants in Knebworth demonstrate that they can take up lots of space in people’s bins and being able to recycle this material is great news for the residents of Sawbridgeworth.” 

The challenge of recycling plastic bags and wrapping is significant, with these materials comprising 22% of all UK consumer plastic packaging in 2020, yet only 8% was recycled.  

Currently, supermarket collection points are the primary recycling option for these plastics in the country. 

This trial is part of the £2.9m Flexible Plastic Fund (FPF) ‘FlexCollect’ project, which is a collaborative effort involving charity the Waste & Resources Action Programme and nine local authorities in England.  

The project’s end goal is to guide the domestic government and industry on the integration of plastic bag and wrapping recycling into existing household collection services. 

The majority of the funding for the FlexCollect project comes from the FPF, the Department for Environment Food, and Rural Affairs, and UK Research and Innovation’s Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge Fund. 

In March this year, North Herts Council announced the expansion of the plastic bags and wrapping recycling trial to more than 6,000 homes in the region.