Recycling

Here at Dublin Zoo, we produce a LOT of rubbish! With more than one million visitors per year, that’s no surprise. We are working together with SSE Airtricity to recycle as much of this waste as possible.

As part of our sustainability journey, we’ve bought 175 heavy-duty picnic benches for the Zoo. Each table is made from more than 2,000 plastic milk bottles. We have stopped a grand total of 350,000 plastic milk bottles from going into a landfill. If you recycle your plastic, who knows? – it might turn up back at the Zoo!

Activity for your home – how can I reduce my plastic use?

Reducing your plastic use can be overwhelming. To get started, make a lost of some of the plastics you use on a daily basis. Could any of these items be replaced with reusable products? You could have a big impact on reducing your plastic use by selecting more reusable products for everyday life, such as steel water bottles or cloth shopping bags.
While food shopping, you may notice that a lit of products are excessively packaged. Another way to reduce your plastic intake is to choose food that has less or no packaging. For example, you can buy loose fruits and vegetables rather than pre-packaged produce. It can be difficult to avoid putting items packaged with plastic in your shopping trolley, but remember that you can always bring your plastic waste – as long as it’s clean and rigid – to a recycling bin or to your local recycling centre. There you will see how much waste we all go through.

DID YOU KNOW?

A plastic-coated paper milk carton can take five years to decompose, while a plastic bag can take between 500 and 1,000 years.

Every year, an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles along with one million sea birds are killed by marine plastic pollution.