Mark your calendars, dust off your wellies and prepare your best bin puns. Recycle Week 2026 runs from 14 to 20 September, and here at IPL Brightgreen we are throwing ourselves into it.
Hang on, what is Recycle Week?
For the uninitiated, Recycle Week is the UK’s biggest annual celebration of recycling, run by WRAP through its Recycle Now campaign. It brings together local authorities, businesses, schools and households across the country with one simple mission: helping everyone recycle more and recycle better.
And this year it matters more than ever. With the Simpler Recycling reforms rolling out across England, standardising what gets collected at the kerbside, 2026 is the year recycling gets a lot less confusing for households. No more standing over the bin holding a yoghurt pot and questioning your life choices. Well, fewer of those moments, anyway.
As a company that spends every single day turning waste polypropylene and HDPE back into useful material at our Castleford site, this is basically our Glastonbury. So naturally, we are getting stuck in.
What we are up to
Beach cleans sand between our toes, litter in our bags
There is something quite grounding about a beach clean. You arrive full of optimism, you leave with a bag full of bottle tops, a rogue flip flop and a new appreciation for just how far a crisp packet can travel.
During Recycle Week, the IPL Brightgreen team will be swapping the factory floor for the shoreline, gathering up the plastic that should never have made it to the coast in the first place. It is hands on, it is humbling, and it is a brilliant reminder of why the work we do matters. Every piece of plastic we recover and recycle is a piece that never ends up tangled in seaweed.
Fair warning: there will be photos. There may be competitive litter picking. Someone will definitely find something weird. There is always something weird.
Recycling education in schools: the next generation of recycling legends
We will also be offering data and support to several schools throughout the week, bringing recycling education to the people who genuinely hold the future of the planet in their hands. And who, in our experience, ask far better questions than most adults.
The session will cover what actually happens to plastic after it leaves the bin, how a grubby old product becomes a shiny new pellet, and why not all plastics are created equal. Expect show and tell with real recycled material, a few myth busting moments, and at least one child asking a question so good it stumps the entire team.
Children are brilliant recycling ambassadors. They go home, inspect the family bins, and hold their parents firmly to account. We are simply arming them with the facts.
Litter picks in our local area: keeping Castleford tidy
Charity starts at home, and so does litter picking. Throughout the week our team will be out and about in the local area around our Castleford site, litter pickers in hand, giving the streets, verges and green spaces a proper going over.
It is a small thing, but small things add up. Every can, bottle and wrapper collected is one less piece of litter in our community and, where possible, one more item heading back into the recycling loop where it belongs. Plus, there is no team bonding exercise quite like debating who bagged the most impressive haul.
If you spot us out and about in our high vis, do come and say hello. We are very friendly and only slightly competitive.
All week on socials: your daily dose of recycling wisdom
Not everyone can join a beach clean or a litter pick, but everyone can scroll. So throughout Recycle Week we will be sharing daily educational content across our social channels: recycling tips, behind the scenes peeks at what really happens inside a plastics recycling facility, myth busting, and answers to the questions we get asked most.
Ever wondered whether you need to wash your recycling? Whether black plastic is really the villain it is made out to be? What on earth a pellet is and why we get so excited about them? Follow along and all will be revealed.
We promise it will be genuinely useful, occasionally amusing, and entirely free of lectures. Nobody ever recycled more because they were told off.
Why we bother
Here is the honest truth: recycling only works if everyone plays their part. Households sorting their bins properly. Councils collecting consistently. Schools teaching the next generation. And recyclers like us turning all that effort into high quality material that goes back into new products.
WRAP’s research shows that billions of recyclable items still end up in general waste every year across the UK. That is billions of items that could have had a second life, lost to landfill or incineration. Recycle Week exists to chip away at that number, and we are proud to chip alongside it.
So whether you join a beach clean, quiz your kids on what they learned at school, or simply give your yoghurt pot a quick rinse before it goes in the bin, you are part of it. That is rather the point.
Get involved
Recycle Week 2026 runs from 14th to 20th September!
