To some of us it means giving things like plastic and metal another life. To others, it means doing your bit to stop things going to landfill. It may also mean having lots of different coloured bins in your garden!

Have you ever thought about what happens to your bins’ contents after they are collected? The contents are taken away, broken down to their basic components and then re-used in the making of new items.

I feel that we can all do our bit to help this process, even simple things like taking a few minutes to wash out empty glass bottles and taking them to a recycling bank, instead of just shoving them in the bin.

Alternatively, why not be creative and make something out of your rubbish? There are lots of videos on YouTube and this is one of my favourites which uses old toilet roll tubes!

New Waste (Scotland) Regulations have been passed by Scottish Parliament, which will require all businesses to separate paper and card, plastic, metal and glass for recycling by January 2014. Businesses that produce more than 5kg of food waste per week will also need to separate this for collection.

To support the changes required by the regulations, Zero Waste Scotland will be investing £8m in councils and commercial waste management firms this year, including £5m to support the roll-out of new food waste collections and £750,000 to help increase the availability of collection services to Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs.)

What does ‘recycling’ mean? To most of us it means extra different coloured bins in your garden, or at your gate, and groans as you try to work out which item goes in which bin, and on what day.

What happens to the bins and their contents then, after collection? The contents are taken away, broken down to their basic components, and then re-used in the making of new items, yes?

But what happens when the things thrown away to be recycled are not consumer items, but valued people with valuable skills? At the Social Enterprise, ‘Recycle Fife’, in Lochgelly, there is no scrap heap for workers. In the absence of new apprenticeships, and in the context of communities where many families have known generations of joblessness, Recycle Fife has pledged to give a chance to those previously written off.

At Recycle Fife we provide a valuable service to our domestic and commercial customers by helping them reduce their waste that goes to Landfill. We also constantly seek new ways to reduce our own impact on the environment by adapting to newer friendly technologies and practices.

One are that can often be overlooked by companies is their impact on the environment through their website. This may seem small at first but when you look into how websites are hosted and powered, you begin to see how a website can increase Co2 emissions.

For example you must find somewhere to host your website. If you are not hosting your site by yourself then you will require a data centre. Data Centres are usually a large operation requiring much energy to power the servers. That is why earlier in the year, we took the decision to host our site on Green Servers provided by HostPapa which uses renewable energy sources to power their Data Centre.