They are the frustrating items that can't go in your recycling bin and end up in landfill.

SUMMER salads and cold sandwiches no longer cut the packed lunch mustard –  so it’s time to turn the heat up. Thanks to insulated pots and stay-warm mugs, you can keep just about anything hot enough until lunchtime. RECYCLE food containers and plastic water bottles, thanks to TerraCycle’s new programme with food container firm Sistema, allowing households to recycle these items if they aren’t picked up by councils.

TerraCycle has launched the UK’s first free recycling programme for any brand of food storage containers and reusable plastic water bottles, which it says allows households to recycle these hard-to-recycle items.

Anyone can sign-up to the programme and be awarded points for each item they send in to be recycled. These points are redeemable as monetary donations to fund good causes including charities, community initiatives, and schools. The recycling programme has been set up by TerraCycle in collaboration with Sistema – a manufacturer of food storage containers and reusable bottles. It has been designed to give well-used food storage containers and reusable plastic water bottles a second life after use.

A KIND-HEARTED Hayling Island woman has raised more than £130 for charity by collecting and recycling ‘unrecyclable’ items from the community.

Any unused crisp packets will be donated to TerraCycle, another project raising funds for the Crisp Packet Challenge and rainforest charities.

Recycling firm TerraCycle is giving consumers the option to “buy better” with the launch of the TerraCycle Made collection, a small selection of products created from recycled and recyclable materials all sourced from various TerraCycle recycling programmes.

Now, brands like Garnier, Maybelline, Kiehl's and L'Occitane are working with recycling company TerraCycle to create drop-off points (you can usually find them in supermarkets) for your beauty empties, with some exceptions such as aerosol cans, perfume bottles, nail polish bottles, and nail polish remover bottles.

In 2019, TerraCycle partnered with Johnson & Johnson Vision to launch a contact lens recycling scheme in the UK, with Boots Opticians and independent practices hosting recycling points. It enabled patients to recycle their contact lenses and packaging, which were then turned into new products such as outdoor furniture. TerraCycle told Optician that despite lockdown seemingly impacting patients’ ability to recycle at an optical practice, waste units received by TerraCycle increased. Since the date of the first lockdown on March 23, 2020, it received 3,999,144 units of waste compared to 3,227,599 units of waste in the 15 months following the programme’s inception in January 2019.

Pringles has expanded its partnership with TerraCycle in order to create 500 new collection points for its tubes. By providing more public drop-off locations, and with the continuation of ACE-UK Bring Banks taking containers with metal ends, the aim is for consumers to be able to recycle Pringles packaging in up to 85 per cent of council areas across the UK.

Putting the planet first has never been higher on the agenda of beauty brands, but for consumers trying to do the right thing, shopping sustainably remains a minefield. “Natural”, for example, isn’t sustainable if it comes sealed with plastic tape, and “clean”, arguably a marketing ploy over and above anything else, isn’t good for the environment if it’s packaged in virgin plastic or contains sunscreen ingredients that might look transparent on your skin but will harm the few remaining coral reefs.