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The red bag is for household plastic bottles, pots, tubs and trays, and metal packaging such as tins, cans, foil and aerosols.
It will be delivered with full instructions so, if you’re taking part, you can use it straight away along with your existing recycling boxes.
It should make recycling much easier for households and crews, as plastic and cans will go in the new red bag, along with paper and cardboard in one green recycling box, glass in the other, and food waste in the brown box.
We’re looking to see if the new red bags help speed up collection times for crews, so providing a more reliable service and reducing congestion on busy roads.
This trial is in response to feedback from our recent waste consultation, where residents told us that they’d like more space for recycling and for it to be simpler to sort.
Better sorted recycling is higher quality and worth more money, which helps cover the cost of collections and generates an income to fund vital local services.
Other councils already using similar recycling bags have found they provide a good solution for the storage and collection of recycling, plus reduce litter.
If the trial is successful, we will be rolling-out the bag to all North Somerset households at the same time as introducing three-weekly black bin collections in 2025.
Recycling plastic bottles
Many drinks bottles now have the lid attached to the bottle, but the way you recycle remains the same.
Plastic bottle lids are very small and can easily become litter during collection.
They can also get easily lost in the sorting machinery when they are being processed so are much harder to recycle than the bottle itself.
A new EU law was introduced in July saying all single-use drinks bottles with plastic lids (up to three litres) could only be sold if the lids were attached during storage and use.
While it’s not law here, they are available in the UK too.
To recycle all types of plastic bottles:
- empty
- rinse (it doesn’t have to be spotless)
- squash the air out and put the lid back on to keep the bottle squashed in.