What you can and can’t recycle

It’s Plastic Free July! It’s all about reducing plastic pollution and helping keep our streets, oceans and communities clean. The campaign website provides many resources and ideas to help you reduce your use of plastics, but do you know how to recycle your plastic and other waste in Lincoln?

The university has many waste collection facilities across campus. The following types of waste, or ‘streams’, are collected:

• Paper
• Dry mix recycling
• Glass
• General waste
• Battery
• WEEE
• Hazardous waste

But what does this mean? And where can you recycle your waste?

Recycling

On-campus and in student accommodation (where recycling is located outside in the bins with the orange lids), you can recycle:

• Empty and clean cans and tins (including aerosols)
• Biscuit tins
• Bottle tops (plastic and metal)
• Cartons/packaging
• Catalogues/magazines
• Clean foil
• Food trays
• Glass bottles/jars
• Ice cream and butter tubs
• Paper and card
• Plastic containers

Here is a map highlighting specialist and general recycling on campus.

If you do not live in university accommodation, check out the City of Lincoln’s easy to use guide of anything and everything you can put in your bin. Just find your items in the drop-down list, and it will tell you which bin to put them in!

Recycling batteries

There are a number of specific places across campus where you can recycle portable batteries! This means typical ‘household’ batteries, such as AA, AAA, C, D, 6V, 9.5V and button cells from, for example, watches and calculators. The main battery collection points are:

• MHT Entrance Lobby
• University Library Entrance Lobby
• Minerva Building Security Offices

There are also battery collection side pods on the side of recycling bins in even further places on campus! They look like this, so keep an eye out.

Electrical waste

WEEE refers to Waste from Electrical and Electronic equipment, so essentially, if you want to bin a broken toaster or some old hair straighteners, it falls under this category. If you live in student accommodation, you can contact the accommodation team to dispose of small WEEE items. If you do not live in student accommodation, you may have to take a trip to the tip.

While a lot of efforts for greener living and combating climate change can feel out of our hands (and if you get the chance, you could write to your MP or join lobbying campaigns about the climate crisis), but making a small change can contribute to massive changes in the local community. Make the effort today to suitably dispose of your waste and become a part of the movement to cleaner living!

The University of Lincoln, in collaboration with the University of Lincoln Students’ Union, is hosting a week of engagement on climate action, in support of COP26. Our aim is to inform, inspire and empower our community to act in response to the Climate and Ecological Emergency that the University of Lincoln declared in 2019.

Find out more about Climate Week and COP26.