Salford currently lies 9% behind the UK’s target to recycle at least 50% of household waste by 2020.

Fay Watts owns Salford’s very first dedicated Zero-Waste store. She said: “There’s so many different types of plastic, the main thing that needs to be focused on is educating people on what can and can’t be recycled”.

Statistics show 9 out of 10 people in Greater Manchester are putting one or more wrong items in their mixed recycling bin. Source: R4GM

Last year it cost recycling centers in Manchester £640,000 to dispose of items mistakenly put into recycling bins.

People in Salford are going Zero-Waste to reduce their environmental footprint. One way people are doing this is refilling their existing plastic containers with household goods like laundry detergent, instead of buying new ones.

Fay Watts opened The Dispensary in Walkden after feeling frustrated with the lack of zero waste services in Manchester.

The Dispensary, Walkden. Image Credit: Thomas Bowen

“It’s a big step for Salford, on our opening day we had queue’s out the door pretty much the whole day”.

Fay Watts hopes to eliminate the stigma that making the switch to zero-waste is expensive.

“I think people think its an expensive thing to do, be more Eco-friendly, when actually its not, it can be a lot cheaper”.

This year, JWS Waste, an independent recycling center in Salford, recycled 63,779.26 tonnes of waste that would have otherwise gone to landfill.

In September, the European Commission released a report detailing half of the European Union member countries are at risk of missing their 2020 recycling targets.

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