About 18,000 households in new Housing Board (HDB) precincts such as MacPherson, Sembawang and Bidadari can look forward to recycling, with the new IKEA recycling bins offered to them.
Residents can redeem the recycling bins at IKEA outlets in Tampines and Alexandra Road from 24 August by presenting the vouchers they received in the mail.
Made from 60 percent recycled plastic, the bins are designed to be durable, functional and washable. They also come in neutral colours and could easily fit into any home.
“Each recycling bin has a prominent blue recycling label, which comes with useful recycling tips like ensuring that recyclables are free from food and liquids, and rinsing bottles and containers before recycling them,” said the National Environment Agency (NEA) and IKEA Singapore in a joint release.
The recycling bins enable the households to accumulate recyclables for a few days “before depositing them into the blue recycling bin at the bottom of the block or recycling chutes on the common floor landing”, they explained.
The initiative comes on the heels of a recycling survey conducted by NEA and the Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources (MEWR) last year.
It found that 60 percent of Singapore households recycle regularly, with convenience cited as an important enabling factor to recycling. The most common reason given for not recycling was that they had too few items to recycle.
“We are happy to work with Ikea Singapore to encourage households to make recycling a daily household routine,” said NEA chief executive Tan Meng Dui.
“For the HDB households which will benefit from this new initiative, the in-home recycling bin makes recycling things more convenient than disposing them as garbage.”
He added that the recycling bin “also brings the “recycling right” message right into the homes of these residents”.
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Fiona Ho, Digital Content Manager at PropertyGuru, edited this story. To contact her about this or other stories, email fiona@propertyguru.com.sg