Recycle Week celebrates its 10th Anniversary this year. From Monday 17 June, the annual event encourages people, local authorities and businesses to recycle.

In the past decade alone the UK has recycled 50 billion plastic drink bottles, enough to reach the moon and back over 10 times. Across the UK, local authority recycling schemes have collected materials like card, paper, plastic and glass worth £2.4 billion.

This includes:

Paper and card worth around £1 billion
Plastic worth around £339 million
Mixed cans worth around £174 million
Mixed glass worth around £153 million
Textiles worth around £124 million

Defra Resource Management Minister Lord de Mauley said:

Dealing with waste and recycling properly not only makes environmental sense but also good business sense. We’ve made great strides in household recycling and over the next decade we can look forward to doing much more to reduce waste in the first place.

Reusing and recycling products and materials will also open up new avenues for UK businesses in growing domestic and export markets.

More ideas and information for consumers is available from http://www.recyclenow.com including a postcode locator to enable people to check what they can recycle in their area.

Join in the twitter conversation #recycleweek2013.