Here at BuilderScrap.com we’re not all about Builders Supplies. This post looks at our recycling habits, so ditch those plastic bags!

As well as asking about people’s current behaviours and their willingness to act, the survey also covered how often people undertook these behaviours (ranging between always and never) as shown in Figure 9. As discussed in the previously, the vast majority (91%) of respondents said they were recycling items rather than throwing them away. Just over half (56%) of all respondents said they “always” did this, 30% said they did this “very” or “quite often”, and 7% said they only did this sometimes.

Most respondents (84%) reported that they were already taking their own shopping bags. When respondents were asked how often they took their own shopping bags when shopping, over half of respondents said they always did this (56%), while a further 20% said they did this very or quite often.
Three quarters (76%) of respondents said they reused items like plastic bottles, tubs, jars, envelopes or paper, although the frequency of reuse varied considerably. Just over a quarter (28%) of respondents said they always reused these items, around a third (33%) said they reused them very or quite often but a quarter (24%) said they only did this sometimes or occasionally. Similar proportions of respondents reported that they never took their own shopping bag when shopping (10%) and never reused items like plastic bottles, tubs, jars, envelopes or paper (13%).

Note

In the UK, there have been two voluntary carrier bag objectives: (i) WRAP introduced a target to reduce the environmental impact of carrier bags by 25% by the end of 2008, based on a 2006 baseline. (ii) In December 2008, the Government and leading supermarkets agreed to a 50% reduction in the number of carrier bags being given out to customers by May 2009.