Balloch residents have been given some top tips on what to do with the Christmas leftovers from the West Dunbartonshire Council!
Almost all Christmas waste can be recycled, from food to trees to cards to wrapping paper.
Those leftover bits of turkey are well past their best by now and deserve to be disposed of from your poor fridge. They go into the brown bin as usual along with the potato peelings, Christmas pudding and Brussel sprouts that were untouched by anyone.
The empty bottles of wine and whisky, or empty jars of cranberry sauce can all be recycled too at one of the glass recycling points in the WDC area.
Christmas tree, the real ones, not fake/plastic, can be recycled too, via a Waste Recycling Centre or indeed at the roadside, but only if your street has a co-mingled food and garden waste collection. They can be left alongside but not inside the brown bins for collection. Plastic / fake/artificial trees cannot use this service and can be disposed of at the Waste Recycling Centre or maybe try a recycling website such as Freecycle.
Christmas cards area simple recycling job – put them into the blue bin for ease, or if you have time there are some shops that recycle them too or again the Waste Recycling Centre can be used. Cutting them up and using them as tags or decorations for next Christmas is also an alternative.
When it comes to wrapping paper then there is the all-important scrunch test. If you scrunch it up and it stays in a ball, then it is paper and can be recycled as such nice and easily. If it does not stay in a ball then it is the plastic paper and cannot be recycled. It is also harder to wrap so along with being less green, two good reasons to no buy it again!
Information such as this can be distributed by councils to local residents if they use a local printer to produce leaflets detailing what can and cannot be recycled. With all this we can at least have a greener Christmas if not a white one.
