Are you doing your bit to reduce your waste?
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There are two main ways to recycle in Hastings and St Leonards.
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Take your recycling to one of our many sites across the town.
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Household items can be taken for recycling to Hastings Household Waste Recycling Centre, which is managed by East Sussex County Council.
The site is located off Bexhill Road (A259). Head towards Bexhill from Hastings on the A259, turn off Bexhill Road at the Wyevale Garden Centre into Freshfields. The entrance to the centre is on the right next to the entrance to the landfill site.
A site visit to your home may be required if the site staff suspect you are taking commercial waste/recycling to the site. All visits are carried out by East Sussex County Council staff.
Monday to Sunday: 9am to 6pm
Monday to Saturday: 8am to 4pm
Sunday: 9am to 4pm
Open usual hours
Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve: open 8am to 1pm
Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Day: closed
Other than those dates, normal opening hours will apply.
For further information, visit the East Sussex County Council Website.
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Remember that your Garden Waste can easily be turned into nutrient rich compost!
We can collect garden waste at the kerbside but not at the same time as household rubbish or recycling. Our new Garden Waste Scheme is available to everybody in the town but we would always recommend that people consider Home Composting first as this remains the most environmentally friendly method of recycling green waste.
If you are unable to home compost and want to join the new scheme, you can do so for an annual £35 fee. In return for this, you will receive a brown wheeled bin which will be emptied from your property fortnightly.
Over two thousand residents have already signed up for the scheme and we are now collecting twice as much garden waste as last year so it's making a massive contribution to increased recycling rates throughout the town. Numbers for the scheme are growing increasingly limited so if you would like to take part please contact us.
Please remember that you can always take green waste to our main recycling centre.
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As an alternative to getting your garden cuttings taken away, why not try home composting?
Organic waste makes up one third of our rubbish; this is a problem if sent to landfill. Being impossible to separate from other rubbish, it will rot, producing methane – a greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
One of the best uses of organic waste is to compost it at home, in conjunction with your waste paper and cardboard. Paper and cardboard should be shredded, torn, or crumpled up, so as to incorporate more air in with your compost. You should add at least the same amount of paper and cardboard as organic wastes, if anything, more paper and cardboard than organic wastes is better.
Composting is the natural process in which microorganisms convert biodegradable organic waste into a useful fertilizer.
Composting organic waste reduces the amount of household waste sent to landfill, provides matter that improves soil structure and increases fertility thus reducing the need for peat and chemical fertilizers, which have detrimental effects on the environment.
Simply layer or mix these materials in your composter. Make sure you chop or shred large pieces to no larger than 5cm. The smaller you break the pieces down, the quicker it will compost. Water and fluff to add air. Micro-organisms will then break the material down over time.
Find a shady place for your composter and put it directly on to bare earth. Bare earth is probably best, but hard-standing is OK. Coloured water draining from the compost may discolour the hard standing. Fill it with a mixture of green and brown waste to start with. Keep the pile moist and aerate it about every two months.
For best composting it is really important that you make a good mixture of 'greens' and 'browns' - at least the same amount of browns to greens; erring on more browns than greens.
Too much green material is more likely to give you a wet and smelly bin; too much brown material will simply give you a dry heap, to which you can easily add water to encourage the composting process.
The more often you turn it (aerate it), the more quickly waste is likely to decompose.
Your compost is ready to use when the original material has been transformed into a uniform dark brown, crumbly product with a pleasant, earthy aroma.
Get reduced price composters from the East Sussex County Council website where you'll also find useful information on a range of green issues including a free 'compost doctor' service from fully trained professionals. Alternatively, East Sussex residents can contact Blackwall Limited on 0845 130 60 90 to order reduced-price composters, water butts and wormeries.
Try composting now; you'll make a positive contribution to the environment and a great plant food to make your garden bloom!
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Operatives sort through materials in a Materials Recovery Facility
The Twin Bin scheme has already helped us increase our recycling from 18% to 27% in less than a year but there's far more to recycling than simply meeting targets.
Recycling has become a vital source of raw materials for manufacturing and reduces the need for ‘virgin’ resources such as trees and oil which is vital in these times of dramatic environmental and climatic change. It's absolutely vital that you sort your recycling properly by making sure the right materials go in your recycling bags or green twin bin or that you take the right materials to our recycling sites and main recyling centre. Whole loads of recycling can be rejected if the wrong items are put together or placed in the wrong container.
Your recycling is collected regularly and goes to a materials recovery facility that uses a range of technologies to sort and extract the different items. These facilities have various markets for all the materials they sort:
Whilst it may seem inappropriate to ship materials such long distances there is an enormous amount of shipping capacity back to Asia due to the volume of imported products we receive so the carbon footprint is in fact low. Exporters of recycled resources are subject to stringent controls and steps are taken to confirm that materials are being recycled.
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Each tonne of paper recycled saves 15 average sized trees, as well as their surrounding habitat and wildlife.
Since the paper-recycling scheme started we have recycled the weight of 1,970 elephants or saved 166,000 fir trees, which is an area the size of Hastings Country Park.
Recycling paper uses less energy and water than making new paper.
Paper can be recycled using kerbside collections or at our Recycling Sites.
Glass is one of the most easy to recycle materials. It is 100% recyclable, it can be recycled indefinitely and recycling glass uses less energy, less raw materials and causes less pollution than producing new glass.
Recycling glass cuts the amount of waste sent to landfill and reduces waste disposal costs (every day 14 million glass bottles and jars end up in landfill), saves energy, reduces the need for quarrying of raw materials, thereby conserving the environment.
Glass should be taken to Recycling Sites for recycling. It is not collected in the Kerbside Recycling Scheme.
Recycling saves up to 95% of the energy needed to produce new aluminium ore and up to 75% of the energy needed to make steel from new materials.
Recycling metals reduces waste.
Aluminium can be recycled again and again without a loss in quality.
Cans and metal can be recycled using the Kerbside Collection Service or taken to Recycling Sites across the town.
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Everyone plays an important part in helping to meet the tough targets for reducing waste and recycling more. There are both national and local targets for recycling and waste reduction.
The European Landfill Directive requires the disposal of biodegradable municipal waste to land to be progressively reduced. In the UK the biodegradable waste we landfill must be reduced to 35% of 1995 levels by the year 2020.
The UK waste strategy 2000 sets out a target of recycling or composting 33% of household waste by the year 2015.
In Hastings our targets for recycling are:
18% for 2005/06
30% by 2010
33% by 2015
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This page last updated: 15/07/2008