We don’t currently recycle food waste separately, or plastic food packaging. We’re looking into options to introduce this, but would appreciate your help by recycling at home.
- You can do this by composting your food waste
- Reducing what you actually use
- Re-using items that we can’t yet recycle
Any leftover meat, fish, bread, dairy products or cooked food should be put in the refuse wheelie bin for disposal. Food waste is anaerobically digested at the Allerton Waste Recovery Park where it is used to produce biogas.
You can try to home compost other food waste from the kitchen such as:
- Teabags and coffee grounds (including filter paper)
- Eggshells
- All fruit and vegetable peelings
- Salad leaves
- Inedible/over ripe fruit and vegetable
The Love Food Hate Waste website has advice, useful tips on the storage of food, tantalising recipes and advice to help you avoid food waste and save money.
Home composting advice
Home composting is an easy way to reduce your household waste and produce compost for free. Composting can be done in either a container or a traditional heap.
Composters
Get Composting is working with City of York Council and North Yorkshire County Council to provide an exclusive offer on home compost bins. To order a bin, call 0844 571 4444 or visit Get Composting.
Help and advice
North Yorkshire County Council’s website has ideas, advice and information about how to make compost and how to use it in your garden.
If you have large quantities of garden waste to dispose of there are a number of options available to you.
- If you subscribe to the Garden Waste Service, garden waste can gradually be disposed of using the brown wheelie bin over a number of weeks. This can include grass cuttings, windfalls, flowers and plants, hedge clippings, leaves and bark, weeds, turf, hay, straw (but nothing that may be contaminated with dog or cat waste), small branches and prunings.
- You can pop along to any tip (Household Waste and Recycling Site), where separate recycling facilities are available for garden waste.
All the garden waste collected from your home, goes to local farmers to be composted, so it’s important that there is no plastic or any other contamination in the bin.
The North Yorkshire Rotters are fully trained volunteers who offer advice on composting and reducing your food and garden waste and can help if you want to know more about composting or are experiencing problems with your compost. Email the Rotters or telephone 01609 797212 for advice.
Plastic packaging
The only plastic we can currently recycle is plastic bottles. We’re looking into options, as we know that recycling is something Ryedale cares about. In the meantime, this recycling locator is a useful tool to see where you can recycle different types of plastics.
There is a good market for used plastic bottles but a less developed market for mixed plastics in the UK. Most local authorities collect plastic bottles for recycling, but far fewer collect mixed rigid plastics. In future, it may be possible to recycle mixed plastics when the industry gears up with additional capacity, but for now, only plastic bottles will be accepted in your kerbside green box.
Plastics other than bottles should not be included for recycling in Ryedale, as there’s a chance that the industry will reject consignments if the polymer mix is in question. See our factsheet about polymer types.
The best thing to do with the plastics we can’t yet recycle is to re-use them where possible. Some supermarkets take them and this website has lots of useful tips to cut down on plastic use.