Recycle Week 2025: Join the mission to rescue recycling from the waste bin

Residents in Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham are being urged to back a national campaign to help waste less and recycle more.

Experts at the award-winning Biffa BDR Waste Partnership at Manvers are supporting Recycle Week’s ‘Rescue Me, Recycle’ campaign (22-28 September) - the UK’s biggest celebration of recycling.

The Biffa BDR plant deals with non-recyclable household waste from 345,000 homes in the area. The facility can handle up to 250,000 tonnes of residual waste a year with over 97% of the waste being turned into energy instead of sent to landfill.

Any overlooked recycling is removed and put back into the circular economy.

The Recycle Week campaign continues to shine a spotlight on missed items that too often end up in the rubbish bin but can, and should, be recycled and turned into something new.

Items perfect for recycling include plastic milk and fizzy drinks bottles, cardboard boxes, beer and wine bottles and metal drinks cans – as long as they are clean, loose and dry.

But a recent Biffa survey found almost one in two people in the UK are confused by which bin to use, meaning lots of recycling is often lost or spoiled.

Following the success of last year’s campaign, ‘Rescue Me – Recycle' returns with two new items joining the rescue recycling mission:

• Shampoo bottles
• Foil

The above items join the list from last year:

• Trigger sprays
• Aftershave and perfume bottles
• Toilet roll tubes

Cllr James Higginbottom, Chair of the Joint Waste Board in South Yorkshire, said: “We are proud of the recycling efforts of residents in our area and the part they have played in helping us to create a cleaner and more pleasant environment. By supporting this year’s Recycle Week and making sure that in future those items that are normally missed are placed in the correct recycling bins we can make our recycling even better than before!”

Catherine David, CEO, WRAP “Recycle Week continues to be a powerful moment to inspire action across the UK, and this year’s ‘Rescue Me! Recycle’ campaign is no exception. By highlighting everyday items like shampoo bottles, foil and toilet roll tubes—things we often overlook—we’re helping people see the real impact of small changes. Together with local authorities and communities, we’re making it easier to do the right thing and keep valuable materials in use. Let’s rescue these items from the rubbish and give them a second life.”

• To help residents find out what can be recycled where they live - pop any postcode in the Recycling Locator and info on recycling anywhere in the UK is instantly revealed: www.recyclenow.com
• Find out more about Recycle Week: www.recyclenow.com/RecycleWeek 

About Recycle Week: 

• First staged in 2004, Recycle Week is now the UK’s largest national annual recycling campaign. It’s a week where citizens, media, local governments, and brands come together to meet one goal; to galvanise everyone into recycling more of the right things, more often. 

About Recycle Now: 

• For more than twenty years, Recycle Now has encouraged and motivated citizens to recycle more things, more often, from around the home. Using ground-breaking research and behaviour change science, it develops interventions and campaigns to motivate citizens to change their behaviour. Recycle Now is the citizen facing recycling campaign of global environmental NGO WRAP

Enquiries

Jill Ward

JWSMedia@btinternet.com

About Biffa

With over 100 years of expertise, Biffa is an established leader of sustainable waste management in the UK.   

Our purpose is to change the way people think about waste and our team of more than 10,000 key workers provide unrivalled end-to-end waste and recycling solutions for thousands of businesses and millions of households each day.  

Underpinned by our low carbon collection network, we’re at the forefront of enabling the UK circular economy by continuing to build our plastic recycling capacity, investing in energy recovery and growing the amount of surplus produce we redistribute through Company Shop.  

Since 2002 we’ve cut our carbon emissions by 70% and aim to be net zero by 2050. Our long-standing Biffa Award programme and our proud partnership with WasteAid also contribute to major environmental benefits for the UK and beyond.

Visit biffa.co.uk or find us on LinkedIn, Facebook and X.