Did you know that you can play a big part in helping us to raise the profile of recycling by taking part in our competition to name four of our recycling trucks, which launches today.

Residents can take part by submitting their choice of name onto the thread set up on the Council’s Facebook and Twitter pages up until October 12.

The best 12 names will be listed on social media and residents will then have the chance to vote for their favourites with the four winning names attached to the front of the trucks.

How we dispose of our waste and its impact on the environment has been making waves nationally.

Of course much of that is down to David Attenborough and his Blue Planet documentaries.

But while I have previously touched on proposals in our draft Waste Strategy to deal with our plastic waste which would guarantee it does not end up in the world’s oceans, recycling more of our household waste is very firmly on the Council’s agenda.

At the moment, only around four per cent of Swindon’s waste goes to landfill with the remainder either being recycled or sent to our Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) plant where it is turned into fuel.

But as good a job as the SRF plant does in preventing our waste from going to landfill, we want to process less of our waste in this way and increase the amount of that waste that is recycled.

The reasons are two-fold. We want to change people’s recycling behaviours to not only make Swindon more sustainable, but to also up our game when it comes to our recycling rate.

At present our recycling rate is only 38 per cent, but we need to get to 50 per cent by 2020 if we are to meet the Government’s recycling target.

This week we are using National Recycle Week to kick-off a campaign which aims to encourage all of us to recycle more of our leftover waste rather than putting it in our black wheelie bins or blue bags.

The recycling campaign will run way beyond this national awareness week because we realise that trying to change people’s behaviours will not happen overnight.

I would encourage you to have a look at some of the excellent social media content we have produced to provide help and advice on what items can be recycled, how to sort recycling boxes, whilst also dispelling some of the myths about recycling.

Remember, if you are entering the competition to name our new truck please be as creative as possible but, like your recycling materials, keep the names clean!

The council’s website has lots of useful information on recycling, just visit: www.swindon.gov.uk/recycling while we would also still love to hear your views on our draft Waste Strategy which can be found at: www.sustainableswindon.co.uk