ALMOST 83% OF SPANIARDS SEPARATE THEIR PACKAGING IN THE YELLOW CONTAINER

82.9% of Spaniards declare that they have at least three bins, bags or spaces in their homes for recycling. This is revealed by the study ‘Hábitos de la Población Española ante el reciclaje’, conducted by Instituto Catchment for Ecoembes, which highlights that this figure has not stopped growing in recent years since, in 2015, only 72.5% of the population claimed to recycle daily.

In 2021, a year still marked by the pandemic, each person deposited on average 18.8 kilograms of waste in one of the 383,508 yellow garbage cans distributed on streets across the country. As for the waste to be deposited in each container, 90% of respondents say they are clear about the blue container. In the case of the yellow container, citizens identify plastic bottles, jars, cans and plastic wrapping more clearly with this container, while there are other wastes, such as aerosols and white cork trays, which should also be deposited in this container but which still generate doubts.

On the other hand, there are still citizens who throw non-container waste into the yellow container and should go to the clean point or the rest container, such as plastic toys, footwear, clothing or plastic products of different types. In fact, 29.8% of the waste in the yellow containers should not have been deposited in them.

According to Fernando Móner, president of the Consumer Confederation CECU, “we must continue to focus on training and information in schools and homes, as the data show us that awareness is growing and that the success of sustainability through recycling must have a clear focus on the habits of consumers together with a clear reduction of waste by finding new uses for it”.

“The increase of more than 5% over the previous year indicates that we are not only recycling more, but also better. More and more people want to contribute to caring for the environment through their daily actions, not only by recycling packaging, but also by reducing its use and reusing it whenever possible,” says Nieves Rey, Director of Communication and Marketing at Ecoembes.

Thus, thanks to these millions of containers that were sent for recycling in 2021, the emission of 2.05 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere was avoided, the equivalent of what is emitted by heating systems in Asturias in one year. In addition, 20.50 million cubic meters of water and 5.27 million MWH of energy were saved.