Ten items you may not know you can recycle

The Blue Planet series has alerted people to the massive issues caused by household waste, and people are keen to help the environment.

To help you get clued up on recycling, Envirofone has found the top 10 items you can recycle but might not know about:

Toothbrushes: The plastic holder and bristles have a variety of uses when repurposed. You can recycle toothbrushes by using a website called Preserve Products, an American company with a UK collection address. The company will recycle your toothbrush to create products for their online store.

Pens: Try recycling with The Writing Instruments Recycling Programme, where Terracycle and BIC have partnered to create a free programme. With schools around the world as collection points, the writing instruments are separated by material composition, cleaned and melted into hard plastic that can be remolded to make new recycled products.

Mobiles: Recycle your old handset? You could gift it to a younger relative or earn yourself a few quid by trading it in on a phone recycling specialist website such as Envirofone, where 98 per cent of the mobiles are reused.

Carpet: If you are planning on redecorating make sure you don’t just don’t throw away old carpet. Instead, find a carpet recycling facility near you. Carpet Recycling UK’s mission is a world where 100 per cent of all carpet waste is diverted from landfill through reuse and recycling.

Old bras: Whether they no longer fit or they’re wearing a bit thin, instead of throwing out old bras you can donate them to Smalls for All which collects and distributes underwear to help women and children in Africa. The Charity helps those living in orphanages, slums, IDP camps and schools, as well as providing underwear to hospitals.

Cigarette butts: TerraCycle has a cigarette butt recycling program. The cigarette butts they collect are used to make industrial items like plastic pallets, and leftover tobacco gets composted.

Makeup packaging: Brands like MAC, Aveda and Origins all have recycling programs in place for responsible disposal. To make it even sweeter, MAC rewards your recycling efforts with its Back To Mac service where you can swap six empty MAC cosmetics containers for a new tube of lipstick!

Wine corks: Recorked UK is the UK’s leading natural wine cork recycling program. Simply donate your used cork, and they resell them. For every cork collected, they donate a percentage of their profit to a nominated charity. Recorked UK also supplies free corks to charities and schools for use in craft projects.

Tights: Once they're a bit worse for wear, you can give tights a new lease of life by transforming them into soft cloths, strainers, protective sheets for plants or even a flexible sling.

Coffee pods: While the single-use pods used in many coffee machines are not generally accepted in your recycling collections from home, some coffee pods are collected by TerraCycle. They recycle them to create new products such as plastic baby bibs, notebook covers and park benches.