A cat-only veterinary practice in has launched a recycling scheme that will prevent thousands of cat food pouches ending up in landfill each month.
Cat owners throughout the North East are being urged to take their empty pet food pouches to SimplyCats Vet Clinic, in Fencehouses, Houghton-le-Spring.
The practice has joined forces with TerraCycle, a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle materials, which has the technology to turn them into a wide range of plastic products including fence posts and benches.
Registered veterinary nurse Lucy Rose-Smith, of independently owned SimplyCats Vet Clinic, kick-started the campaign after discovering her cat-loving team throw away more than 4,300 plastic food pouches a year, which can’t be recycled via domestic recycling bins.
Instead of them going to landfill, she decided to set up one of only three collection points in the North East.
LANDFILL
Lucy said: “Our team absolutely love cats and between us we have 16, but until recently it had never really struck me how much of our pet food packaging goes to landfill.
“I’m conscious that we need to look after our environment and at SimplyCats Vet Clinic we always strive to limit our carbon footprint. By making some simple changes, we can all make a difference.
“Our team members have more than the usual number of pet cats, but I counted the amount of pet food packaging we get through at home and our cats consume 84 wet-food packets in a week – that’s a whopping 4,368 each year!”
In just the first week of launching the campaign Lucy and the SimplyCats Vet Clinic team collected a kilo of cat food pouches and it’s now continually increasing.
