Customers urged to focus on recycling

You’ll know how much we love recycling at Lakeside Village, and we are doing everything we can do to make it easy for you to recycle items when you visit us.
At the start of the year, we pledged to increase the overall Lakeside recycling rate to 80%, offer additional recycling opportunities to customers for clothes, coffee cups, batteries and printer cartridges and to arrange quarterly litter picks with local businesses – the first took place in April.
Before the pandemic forced retail closures, recycling at the centre stood at 77 percent and we are working to improve this figure during 2021.
We are proud of our achievements in this area and believe that we all have a responsibility for the environment and working together we can reduce our waste and our impact on our local surroundings. The opportunity to recycle at the centre is growing and is being reviewed regularly.
The Lakeside Village recycling centre, located in the indoor Guest Service area, is a place where customers can recycle plastic bottles, household batteries, PPE (disposable face masks, plastic gloves, visors and face screens, earplugs and plastic overalls and clothing covers) and inkjet toner and cartridges.
You can recycle your old clothes in a number of ways., you can Bag it for Bluebell – a monthly collection takes place for Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice and helps to raise thousands of pounds each year for children with life-limiting conditions and their families. There is also a clothing unit. Next Best Clothing Ltd, located in the car park that accepts unwanted clothes, shoes, accessories and household items – customers are paid 50p per tonne.
“Costa and Greggs offer free water refills if customers bring in their own bottles, and Costa are also selling re-usable lids for their cups. Stores including The Works, ProCook, Cook N Dine, Next, Hallmark, Clintons, Trespass, Mountain Warehouse, Tog 24, all sell refillable water bottles.
“Our Body Shop Outlet store offers refills for their hand washes and have a lot of new packaging for their products which are made from recyclable plastic and glass”
The onsite Next Outlet offers an electronic waste collection service, for unwanted or broken electrical items, for its click and collect customers if requested at the time of ordering.
We have also recently added a recycling monster bin in the outdoor play area to encourage children to recycle plastic bottles and cans.
 
There is always more to do and the reason we made our pledges at the start of the year was to hold ourselves accountable for making a difference. Our next litter pick will take place in August, and we are always interested in hearing from you with suggestions for other items we could help with recycling.
 
The centre management and cleaning operatives also work hard with its retailers to ensure that any waste is recycled wherever it can be. Food waste is recycled and sent off to be turned into renewable energy and nutrient-rich bio-fertiliser for local farmers. The onsite Gregg’s donates leftover food to a local homeless shelter every week. Cardboard, soft and hard plastic, paper and glass are also processed and sent off for recycling regularly.