Wish-cycling
Not sure whether you should be recycling certain items? Tara Bloom tells us why wishful thinking may be doing more harm than good
Wish-cycling is a well-intentioned but harmful behaviour, which involves throwing questionable items into a recycling bin in the hope that they will be recycled. You may have wish-cycled if you’ve looked at an item and thought ‘This should be recyclable’ or ‘I’m not sure about this, but I don’t want it to go to landfill,’ and put it in the recycling bin with no further thought. However, wish-cycling can have a significant impact on our fragile recycling systems, and is harming our planet, due to the contamination of different products which leads to less recycling and more waste harming our planet.