Do your bit for National Recycle Week

• Holey socks? Save them from the landfill by taking old clothes that are too tatty for charity to your local Household Waste Recycling Centre.

• Collect your old bread bags, freezer bags and bubble wrap and recycle them when you do your next Your Co-op Food shop. With Soft plastic collection points in over 200 Food stores, find your local store here.

• Old printer cartridges can sometimes be donated to schools or charity shops. Alternatively, send them Freepost to an organisation such as The Recycling Factory.

• Got a stash of old or foreign coins lurking in a drawer? Many charity shops accept them or donate your foreign currency at the airport, the next time you fly.

• Don’t chuck that old sat nav or mobile phone in the bin. Electrical items can be taken to your local Household Waste Recycling Centre or returned to selected retailers.

Click here for more recycling tips.

• We now recycle 99% of our waste. This includes sending food waste from our food stores and nursery sites to anaerobic digestion where it is used to produce renewable energy sufficient to power 40 homes per year.

• Through our 1 Change campaign, we are tackling single-use plastic and worked with Fairy Tale Farm to build a turkey shed out of 1,000 eco-bricks formed from discarded plastic. Watch the video here.

• We’re facilitating recycling in our communities too. For example, we’ve partnered with Walsall-based World Against Single-Use Plastic – an organisation that educates local groups on cutting their plastic use. We’ve collaborated with them and other local groups to create a rota system for cleaning local canals. A dedicated book released by the founder, Rashid Gatrad, 'The Story Of Three Plastic Bottles' is now available to buy here.

• We’ve recently introduced soft plastic recycling at 200 food stores, giving our customers the opportunity to recycle materials that aren’t widely recycled by local councils.

• We offer compostable bags in our food stores (which are recycled through composting) instead of single-use plastic bags, saving 8 million plastic bags per year.

• We’re trialling re-fillable products at some of our food stores, including milk vending machines.

• We’re encouraging our active members and colleagues to take to the streets this week for community tidy ups. If you’d like to take part in a future tidy up event, contact your Regional Community Co-ordinator here.

In August, all of our Childcare nurseries achieved the Eco-Schools Green Flag in recognition of their commitment to protecting the environment, both within the nursery and in the wider community.

To achieve Green Flag status, each nursery formed an Eco-Committee made up of our pre-schoolers and an Eco-Champion (usually one of our Early Years practitioners). The Eco-Committee then set about planning the nursery’s environmental curriculum and laying out an Eco-Code for the nursery to follow.