Water recycling is becoming increasingly important in Australia as water resources become stretched by drought and population pressure. It was great to see that Aware readers are doing their bit. About 45% of you occasionally or often ‘use a bucket in the shower to collect water’ and 49.5% of you divert water from the washing machine to the garden.

When organic waste breaks down in landfill it produces methane, a greenhouse gas twenty-times more powerful than CO2, so it was fantastic to find that 70% of you used a worm farm, compost bin and/or bokashi bucket for food and garden waste and 75% of you also used council green waste pick up. Not only do these activities reduce the amount of rubbish you throw out they also reduce you own and the country’s greenhouse emissions.

There was a little room for improvement in a couple of areas. More than half of you either ‘never or rarely’ put aerosol cans in you household recycling. This is probably a hang over from the early days of recycling when people were told not to recycle these. Things have changed and now most councils collect aerosols. To recycle them you just need to make sure they’re empty and remove the lid and nozzle before putting it in your bin.

Nearly 40% of you ‘occasionally or often’ put broken drinking glasses in with your household recycling. Window and drinking glass should never be put in household recycling because they melt at a higher temperature than bottle and jar glass. Just 5 grams of this glass is enough to contaminate a tonne of recycling. It needs to go in the garbage.

Lastly and very impressively, 81% of you 'bring cans and bottles home from the beach/movies' to recycle them. Until public place recycling is mainstream this a great way to reduce litter and to increase recycling rates – congratulations!

About You As a group, Aware News readers are greener than the general public. Not only do you recycle more, with higher rates of organic recycling, you also know more. 40% of Aware readers thought you could put drinking glass in household recycling compared to 80% of the general public. Well done.

About 80% of survey respondents were women. Why there is such a big gender divide is probably a topic for further research.

We’ll have a summary of some of the other questions in next month’s edition of Aware News.

If the survey sparked any recycling queries for you, give the Recycling Hotline a call on 1300 733 712 or check out your council kerbside recycling service at RecyclingNearYou.com.au