Lifesize versions of commonly landfilled items have visited Downing Street at the start of Recycle Week.
Dee Dee the deodorant, Rey the plastic trigger spray, Yogi the yoghurt pot, Fitz the perfume bottle and Hube the toilet roll tube delivered a letter to prime minister Keir Starmer this week.
They were accompanied by celebrity ambassador and athlete JJ Chalmers and Waste and Resources Action Programme chief executive Harriet Lamb in their bid to garner support for an expansion of recycling activity.
More than 7 billion yoghurt pots are binned in the UK each year, according to research, with hundreds of millions of cleaning product containers and aerosols following them.
In fact four in five of us put one or more items into our general rubbish pile that could be recycled.
Lamb said: “Too often we’re putting goods such as deodorant cans, yogurt pots or cleaning bottles in the rubbish when they can in fact be recycled.
“The more items we rescue from the main bin, the less goes to landfill and incineration, the more we reduce our impact on the climate.
“This Recycle Week, we urge every household, business, school and organisation to help rescue more items from the rubbish bin so that we can achieve a world where landfill becomes little more than a memory, where we are recycling everything possible – and of course reducing the amount we use in the first place.”
