Village Sustainability Newsleter, February 2026

I’m talking rubbish

For environmental reasons we choose to eat little meat, and what we do buy is as sustainably produced as possible.  We cook from fresh ingredients rather than processed foods (added health benefits) and reduce single use packaging.  As a result, we eat a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables usually bought on my weekly visits to the market (I prefer Wantage on a Wednesday, but others are available) where they come either packaging-free or in easily recycled paper bags.

After Christmas, I ended up missing my usual Wednesday trip and for once had to do my big fruit and vegetable shop in the supermarket.  Apart from the fact that the food’s quality and freshness was worse than I’m used to, what absolutely horrified me was the amount of plastic packaging shrouding my shopping.  This coincided with changes of day for bin collections and a bit of outrage on local social media groups, where some are already unhappy at the change in emptying our grey household waste bins from fortnightly to three weekly collections.  Some households ran out of bin space and are lobbying for a return to more frequent collections.  It doesn’t take much for me to think about waste and recycling, and this combination of events was no exception.

Even with Christmas and a longer gap between collections, some slackness in our usual strict disposal behaviour over the Christmas holiday, plus some out-of-the-ordinary waste, our bin was still no more than a third full after over three weeks.  It made me wonder what on earth people are filling their bins with!  We do have to do a lot of the work ourselves - I clean and collect separate soft plastics, stamps, lightbulbs, foil, bottle tops etc and deliver to various collection points around the area.  If you ever go into the refurbished Waitrose in Newbury, there is now an impressive bank of collection points where you can drop off corks, empty printer cartridges and all sorts of things – go and have a look.  Other recyclables we collect and take to the household waste site or other locations when we are passing, like occasional Tetrapaks, scrap metal and electrical items.  

The best way of making less waste is to acquire less - regular readers will know this is a theme I return to regularly!  But we can’t always do everything, even with a resolution to try and continuously improve.

I have written before about single use pens like biros, freebie poor-quality advertising pens, felt tips, markers, propelling pencils etc, and it used to be possible to recycle them via local superstars collecting for Terracycle and a scheme that ran in Rymans.  Both of those have now ended and I have been researching alternatives.  I first looked at Terracycle themselves (who were advertising a sale.)  They sell you a box and over time you fill it with your empty pens and return it to them.  The boxes seem incredibly expensive though the larger ones are clearly aimed at businesses, but a quick bit of maths suggested that the recycling cost would work out at approximately 13p per pen, which struck me as affordable.  We expect our waste to be removed free of charge but sometimes behaviours can be changed radically by a small additional cost (plastic bags I’m looking at you!). 

A late edit is that I have been made aware of a pen Return Box scheme offered by Edding which I am investigating, and I will keep you posted on the success of that.

So this month’s challenge is to see just how little stuff you can put in your grey waste bin.  If you want advice on where various items can be recycled there is information on the West Berkshire website, as well as various social media groups eg Facebook’s very helpful Thatcham and Newbury Plastic, Recycling and Zero Waste, UK which is run by the fabulous Thatcham Refillable.  Around here our waste is incinerated for power generation so it doesn’t go into landfill, but any incineration clearly causes environmental harm so the less we burn the better.

Julia Hoaen