As Christmas festivities and New Year’s celebrations come to a close, many are considering the impact their waste will have on the environment.

According to Biffa, the UK creates 30% more waste at Christmas than other times of the year. 227,000 miles of wrapping paper is thrown away in December and Christmas waste accounts for the generation of 1.4 million tonnes of CO2.

Some are concerned with the inefficiency of Christmas recycling and waste disposal. A Mitcham resident commented: “Due to the delay in waste collection services, the excessive wrapping paper and food wrappers have piled up in our bins. This, coupled with the cleaning up post-Christmas and New Year’s, means that our bins outside no longer have space to fit any more bags. The bins themselves can’t even close properly. The new services are based on an alternate two-week rota, which means that if certain dates are missed by the trucks, our bins won’t be emptied until 2 weeks later.”

In the May 2018 London Environment Strategy Sadiq Khan emphasised the importance of making London a greener city: “Real progress to improve the quality of our air, clean up our natural environment and decarbonise our energy sources will take time.”

“We have already embedded the latest green thinking at the heart of my strategies for transport, planning and the economy, set ourselves a target of making London a zero waste city.”

The Strategy outlines plans to implement “higher recycling standards” and help Londoners to “use less packaging.

“This will help London send zero waste to landfill by 2026 and recycle 65 per cent of its municipal waste by 2030.”