New campaign in development to prevent recycling contamination from nappies

In the UK, nearly 8 million disposable nappies are thrown away every day, which is 3 billion nappies a year. Recent research, carried out by our Centre for Social Innovation, revealed that there is genuine confusion amongst the public about whether or not disposable nappies are recyclable , despite many local authority communication campaigns highlighting that they cannot be recycled. This is leading to people mistakenly putting nappies into their recycling, which can lead to the rejection of whole loads of recycling.

In response, Keep Britain Tidy is working with nine partner local authorities to professionally develop a new nappy contamination campaign. The campaign will consist of a single campaign message and visual which is tested with parents and other users of nappies to ensure that it is well understood and motivates people to dispose of their nappies in their residual waste. 

We will also be conducting a national survey to quantify the number of people who think nappies are recyclable to help garner media interest in the topic and further raise awareness of this important issue.
We will be launching the campaign together with our nine partners in February 2021. After six months we intend to make the campaign materials available to wider members of the Keep Britain Tidy Network.

The partner local authorities we are working with, with a combined population of over 7.5 million people, are: Buckinghamshire Council, Dorset Council, Durham County Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority, Leicestershire County Council, Milton Keynes Council, North London Waste Authority, Suffolk Waste Partnership, and Wigan Council. Keep Britain Tidy will also deliver a mobilised version of the campaign in Milton Keynes as part of wider work with the Council to tackle contamination.

The nappy campaign forms part of our new Contamination Reduction Programme, in response to an issue that costs local authorities millions of pounds a year.

If you would like to find out more about the support we can offer to better understand and address your contamination issues, please get in touch through our enquiries form.

If you are interested in learning about the results of the Contamination Reduction Programme and other waste-related projects from the Keep Britain Tidy team please sign up to our newsletter.