Glastonbury urged to wash and squash

We have been using them for 65 years and between water and milk, soft drinks and shampoo, bleach and juices, we get through a staggering 15 million of them every day in the UK.

Yes, humble household plastic bottles have never been so much in demand, with use set to soar, thanks to a summer of sport and celebration.

From festivals to the Olympics, barbecues to Wimbledon, it will be thirsty work for millions doing their best to enjoy events in whatever weather the summer brings.

So 2012 is set to be a bumper year for household plastic bottles, but with far too few reaching the recycling box or site, this week's national Recycle Week 18-24 June wants to see a bumper year for collecting them too.

And Somerset Waste Partnership (SWP) hopes Glastonbury's residents will all think twice before jettisoning household plastic bottles into the rubbish bin to send them to costly landfill.

It is easy to recycle all shapes and sizes of bottle, by dropping them into either the weekly kerbside collection box or any one of Somerset's 18 recycling sites. All you have to do is rinse – water from washing up is fine – and squish.

Recycling household plastic bottles saves materials, energy, money and carbon. Each tonne of household plastic bottles recycled saves 1.5 tonnes of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. If everyone in the UK recycled just one extra plastic bottle during Recycle Week, it would save enough energy to power more than 71,000 plasma screen TVs for a year.

So what happens to bottles during recycling? They are separated by colour, cleaned, melted down and then turned into plastic pellets. These are used to make fences, bags, flooring, window frames, fleeces, fibre fillings … or even more bottles.

Plastic points

• Before recycling please rinse your bottles out and squash them.
• No need to remove the labels as this is done as part of the recycling.
• Recycling sites and kerbside collections take household plastic bottles.
• Yoghurt pots, margarine tubs, food trays, plastic film are not accepted.
• It takes 25 two-litre plastic bottles to make an adult-sized fleece.
• Plastic bottles were first used commercially in 1947.
• The UK uses 15 million plastic bottles every day.

For more on recycling and waste, visit Somerset Waste Partnership.