Recycle Week 2026: Cheltenham Borough Council joins the call to rescue your recyclables

Inspiring action since 2004, Recycle Week is the nation’s biggest annual celebration of recycling, delivered by Recycle Now.

This year, Recycle Week (14-20 September) is showing people how their recycling truly makes a difference, and that it’s worth doing properly - and Cheltenham Borough Council are proud to support the campaign.

Each year, billions of items that could be recycled are put in the wrong bins around the UK. Each item that is recycled correctly helps save energy and keeps valuable materials in circulation to be used again.

To help bring this to life, the Recycle Week campaign stars a cast of recyclable characters, whose stories show how valuable they are, and why they’re worth rescuing from the rubbish. The lineup includes:

- Shampers the shampoo bottle – who can be recycled into a plastic garden chair

- Spritz the fragrance bottle – who could come back as a champagne bottle

- Rolly the toilet roll tube – who can be turned into a notebook

- Deo the aerosol – who could become part of a bike

- Minty the toothpaste tube – who can be recycled into another toothpaste tube

- Trigger the cleaning spray bottle – who can be recycled again into a new spray bottle

- Yogi the yoghurt pot – who can come back as another yoghurt pot

- Ally the kitchen foil – who can be recycled into part of a car engine

New for this year is Neil the banana peel who can be used to create green energy and be recycled into fertiliser.

Thanks to industry innovation and WRAP’s technical expertise, toothpaste tubes can now be collected by some local authorities in kerbside collections for recycling—marking a major step forward in tackling hard-to-recycle items.

2026 has been a big year for recycling, already. New policy, upcoming changes, and packaging developments, all helping improve recycling rates and we have now added cartons to our kerbside collection with flexible plastics coming soon. However, nothing changes without people choosing to recycle. This year Cheltenham is taking part in Recycle Week to help our community have maximum impact. Helping change behaviour, so that the right things go in the right bins.

Councillor Steve Harvey, cabinet member for waste, recycling, parks, gardens and green open spaces, said: “I want to thank Cheltenham residents for recycling as much as they do but we can all recycle more at kerbside.

“From 1 April this year residents can also recycle cartons/tetrapak which go in the plastic and cans box or bin. From Monday 2 November – flexible plastic bags and wrappings can also be recycled at kerbside using the blue bag provided OR by re-using a plastic bag from home (no bigger than a carrier bag please). Look out for information about this coming soon”

Waste minister Emma Hardy says: “I fully support Recycle Week and its aim to help people recycle more of the right things, more often.

"This government is making recycling simpler and more consistent by ending the postcode lottery for recycling services and ensuring households can recycle the same core materials wherever they live.

"This Recycle Week, I encourage everyone to check the Recycle Now Locator to see what can be recycled in their area and help keep more valuable materials in use for longer.”

Catherine David, CEO, WRAP says “Recycling is one of the easiest ways we can all help to divert millions of tonnes of waste from landfill and incineration, conserve scarce natural resources and cut carbon emissions. Each year millions of shampoo bottles, aluminium foil, toothpaste tubes and other recycling are binned when they could be recycled, so this Recycle Week we're asking people to be a hero at home and rescue more recycling. Together with local authorities and communities, we’re making it easier to keep these valuable materials in use and give our recycling a second life.”

To find out more about Recycle Week this year, visit: www.recyclenow.com/recycle-week-2026

Notes to editors

About Recycle Week:

• First staged in 2004, Recycle Week is now the UK’s largest national annual recycling campaign. It’s a week where citizens, media, local governments, and brands come together to meet one goal; to galvanise everyone into recycling more of the right things, more often. hwww.recyclenow.com/recycle-week-2026

About Recycle Now:

• For more than twenty years, Recycle Now has encouraged and motivated citizens to recycle more things, more often, from around the home. Using ground-breaking research and behaviour change science, we develop interventions and campaigns to motivate citizens to change their behaviour. Recycle Now is the citizen facing recycling campaign of climate action NGO WRAP.

About WRAP:

• WRAP is a global environmental action NGO catalysing policy makers, businesses and individuals to transform the systems that create our food, textiles and manufactured products. Together these account for nearly 50% of global greenhouse emissions. Our goal is to enable the world to transition from the old take-make-dispose model of production to more sustainable approaches that will radically reduce waste and carbon emissions from everyday products. To do so we examine sustainability challenges through the lens of people’s day-to-day lives and create solutions that can transform entire systems to benefit the planet, nature and people. Our work includes UK Packaging Pact, UK Food and Drink Pact, UK Textiles Pact and the global Food Pact Network and The Plastic Pact Network, and the campaigns Love Food Hate Waste and Recycle Now. We run Food Waste Action Week and Recycle Week (Mon 14 to Sun 20 September).

Recycle Week 2026: Cheltenham Borough Council joins the call to rescue your recyclables

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