Recycling facilities in shopping centres
According to a report by the drinks can recycling programme Every Can Counts, more than half of UK consumers have never used their local shopping centre’s recycling facilities.
These results were taken from a survey of customers at two shopping centres with a combined footfall of 38 million. The report also claims that over 90% of consumers recycle regularly at home, and 72% claim to frequently recycle outside of the home.
Asked how facilities could be improved at shopping centres to encourage recycling, 57% said that they wanted ‘more recycling bins, in convenient locations’. Other suggestions included better promotion of facilities and more information about the benefits of recycling.
The findings form part of a two-phased research report into the recycling attitudes and practices at shopping centres and the efforts being made to cut waste. The beverage can industry’s recycling initiative implemented ‘phase one’ in 2014 to learn more about recycling attitudes and practices at shopping centres, which showed that there has been significant improvements in facilities and employee efforts to recycle in recent years, especially for retail tenants recycling business waste.
Rick Hindley, executive director of Every Can Counts, says, “These figures show that there is a lot more to be done to communicate the importance of recycling when consumers are out shopping, and to make it as easy as possible for consumers to recycle. This is especially important when you consider that one in every three drinks cans sold in the UK is drunk outside the home.”
He continues, “In ‘phase one’ of our research we gained insight from environmental and waste management professionals operating in shopping centres across the country. Now that ‘phase two’ of the research is complete, we have a 360˚ view of how recycling programmes are delivered and received. These findings confirm to us the importance of taking a ‘joined up’ approach to away from home recycling: it’s not enough to create recycling points, they need to be actively promoted to help develop a recycling ‘habit’ among people who are on the go.”
