Exeter residents thanked for "fantastic job" recycling at Christmas

Exeter’s recycling chief has thanked city residents for their recycling efforts over the Christmas period and urged people to reduce, reuse and recycle, moving forward.

Hundreds of tonnes of aluminium cans, plastic containers and cardboard boxes were collected from houses across Exeter over the holidays.

The materials are now being sorted and sent off, bringing in valuable revenue to ensure that key frontline services can be maintained.

Cllr David Harvey, Lead Councillor for Environment & City Management, said: “Thanks very much to the people of Exeter. We’ve done a fantastic job recycling over Christmas. People have really embraced the fact that Christmas cards, Christmas trees and wrapping paper aren’t great to go in the recycling and of course we’ll be collecting your Christmas trees as part of the brown bin service as soon as we possibly can.”

Cllr Harvey said that although recycling was good, people also needed to reduce and reuse.

“Recycling is fantastic but in terms of our vision to be carbon neutral by 2030 what we really need people to do is look very hard at the hierarchy – reduce, reuse and recycle.”

Cllr Harvey said that Exeter lead the way in reducing the amount of household waste it produced.

“Exeter is the 4th lowest local authority in the country - outside London – for the amount of waste that we actually produce. Of course it’s great recycling waste but we’d rather not produce it at all,” he added.