Buckinghamshire Council has joined forces with charity Keep Britain Tidy to launch a new campaign aimed at stopping disposable nappies from being recycling.

The campaign comes after a new national survey revealed that seven percent of nappy users wrongly put their disposable nappies in with their recycling.

This equates to more than one million people and locally, over 13% of lorry loads collected for recycling in Buckinghamshire contain nappies.

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The national survey, carried out by YouGov, also revealed that younger people, aged 18-24 were more likely to put them in their recycling bin (15%) and more than one in ten Londoners who used disposable nappies (11%) tried to recycle them.

Fronted by ‘Ted’ time campaign will be appearing on billboards around the country and on social media to drive the message home.

Cllr Bill Chapple OBE, Cabinet Member for Environment and Climate Change, said:

“Nappies have to be extracted from the rest of the recyclables, this is an unpleasant job which often has to be done painstakingly by hand.

“The word recycling means to use it again; what part of a nappy would we want to use again?

“So please remember that nappies are rubbish.

“Used or not used, they cannot be recycled.

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Keep Britain Tidy’s Chief Executive Allison Ogden-Newton OBE, also reiterated the message that nappies should not be recycled.

She said: “We are delighted to be partnering with Buckinghamshire Council to tackle this issue.

“Recycling contamination, including disposable nappies, costs local authorities hundreds of thousands of pounds a year and stops many tonnes of waste from being recycled.

“The message to everyone who uses disposable nappies is clear – nappies never go in your recycling.”

Keep Britain Tidy is also calling on nappy manufacturers to label their products as non-recyclable to help avoid confusion.