How do we get people to think of ‘materials’ rather than ‘waste’? If only the word ‘waste’ could be permanently resigned to the trash. Can manufacturers be forced to think about how their products would be redeployed at the end of their useful life? Can we reverse this ‘throw-away’ economy we’ve adopted in recent years?

Oh dear! I’m being nagged to go on a diet. Yolanda thinks I’ve put on weight. But in my defence, I have to say, it is all in a good cause.

I have been carrying out some important research. As the season of excess is upon us I wanted to find out what a green-living, eco-loving dog like me can eat, snack-wise, while watching The X-Factor Final and the Queen’s Christmas message without getting the blues about excess packaging.

Today, I’ve decided that I love Smarties. They come in a groovy hexagonal box made of cardboard which is 100% recyclable. And what’s more, all Smarties are completely yummy. There are no yukky ones in there that will languish in the packet and get thrown away.

Do you have a favourite colour of Smarty? I know you probably think mine would be green. But, just to surprise you, I don’t mind sharing the fact that my absolute favourites are the blue ones.

Are you a sweetie lover?

I love sweeties. All kinds of sweeties. But I promised Yolanda that I was going to try to stick to eating sweeties that come in recyclable packaging.

So, that means I need to do a bit of research. What sweeties can I still eat?

I came across a box of Quality Street in Mr Smith’s Bin the other day. Couldn’t believe my luck, but there were still three sweeties in there (and a bit of orange peel and a banana skin – you have to take the rough with the smooth!). I put the orange peel and the banana skin on my compost heap. I hope by this time next year it will be fertilising my garden. Then I set about doing some serious research. The three sweeties were all blue ones. Clearly nobody in Mr Smith’s house likes the blue ones, but luckily for me they’re my favourites.

As I unwrapped sweetie number one – step one in my research is to check that I like them – I noticed the writing on the side of the box.

Did you know that you can separate the wrappers and put the foil bit into your recycling box like you would a drinks can? The outer wrapper can go in your compost bin. How cool is that?

The instructions for how to dispose of the cardboard box say: ‘Remove the window from the empty carton and put the window bit in the bin. The card can then be quickly and easily recycled. Simply put it in your local recycling bank or kerb-side recycling box.’

It is great that most of the packaging is recyclable or compostable. It is great that they tell you that on the box. But why do they bother with the window? Couldn’t they find a way to make that recyclable too?

How hard would it really be to make that decision to never, ever throw a plastic bottle in a rubbish bin (or a hedge or ditch or wherever else lazyitis causes people to chuck stuff)?

With more and more recycling points out and about this is getting to be more realistic all the time. When I was asking one of those nice people at the district council recently about whether we could have a recycling bin at out local park, he mentioned that one of the difficulties with provided recycling points instead of bins is that people often don’t use them properly. Can you believe, people put the stuff in the wrong hole?

I don’t know why people say this, but I’ve heard it said of things, that it is so easy a monkey could use it. I asked a monkey friend of mine and she said she thought it was pimps.

So what if you can’t see a plastic recycling point when you are out and about? I asked the monkey what she thought and she said ‘take it home, that’s pimps too”.

What do you think?

Today I was surfing the net looking into plastics. What I want to know is what all this PET stuff means and what the numbers on plastic packaging actually mean.

This is what I discovered…

PET stands for Polyethylene Terephthalate. No wonder they call it PET for short!

The good thing about PET which is often labelled like this:

is that it’s widely recyclable.  Most people can just put it into their curbside collection boxes and those nice people at the council will organise the rest for us.

It helps if you take the tops off the bottles, squash them flat and then you can put the top back on the bottle or gather the tops up into a separate plastic bag. So, why do you need to take the tops off? Well, that’s simply because you can’t get the air out of them when the tops on.  We don’t need our air to be taken off to the recycling centre – we can recycle that all by ourselves just by breathing in and out – so it is just a waste of space in the recycling trucks. Less air, more plastic bottles per trip, fewer miles traveled by the recycling trucks. See?

Last Friday I decided to do a raid on Mr Smith’s rubbish bin (I’d be grateful if you didn’t mention it to him).  Here’s a picture of the PETs I rescued. Cute, hey?

Milk bottle tops, tin foil and foil lids from yoghurt pots can all be recycled. Trouble is, small bits of stuff get lost in the system when it comes to recycling. A little birdie told me that if you gather up small bits of foil and milk bottle tops, wrap them up in a bigger bit of foil and then squash it all together there’s a better chance of the little fellas getting to the right place at the recycling centre. Stack it, wrap it and then pack it. Easy!