“There’s a lot of recycling myths out there, and confusion, and that’s largely down to a lack of consistency between councils,” says Piper. “Often people will do the wrong thing and not really understand what’s right or wrong.”

Having worked in the industry for over a decade and spent a lot of time working with recycling professionals, Piper realised he had an opportunity to write down all the rules and principles that he’d learned over the years. He went through various websites such as Recycle Now, run by the charity WRAP (The Waste and Resources Action Programme), interviewed colleagues in the industry and recyclers themselves and asked – what makes something more likely to make it through the process and be recycled?

One thing Piper observed during the research process, was the fact that nothing seemed simple. He decided to write a book which would distil information in a way that would uncomplicate the facts and leave readers with tips that were easy to remember and easy to implement.

Here are 6 of his top tips to help you up your recycling game:

1. DON’T crush bottles and cans

“If you’ve been crushing your cans and bottles before popping them in the bin, you’ve actually been reducing their likelihood of getting recycled”, says Piper.

“When mixed recycling is collected from our homes, it’s likely to go to a material recycling facility, which is also called a MRF [pronounced murf]. The way that MRFs sort recycling is by shape and size and so if we crush something like a can or a bottle it may get misread as paper.”

2. DON’T take off labels and lids

Leave labels and lids on packaging. “If we take the lids off or the labels off then those are much less likely to get recycled,” says the sustainability expert. On their own, they are too small to sort. Better to leave lids and labels on bottles as that will increase the likelihood that they get through that sorting facility.

3. Follow the tennis ball rule

As a general rule, anything smaller than a tennis ball is very difficult to sort. If you’re putting aluminium foil in the bin its always best to scrunch the aluminium foil into a ball bigger than a tennis ball.

4. Beware the anti-plastic rhetoric

Piper works with large companies to help them improve their sustainability and finds some are getting it wrong: they’re making switches based on consumer demand – but the consumer is not always right.

“There’s a large anti-plastic rhetoric out there so they’re likely to move away from plastic into something else,” says Piper. “But this isn’t always the greenest move. Recently there are news stories about companies moving from HDPE milk bottles, which are collected by every council and likely to be recycled, into a cardboard carton with a plastic liner inside because the consumer believes that is a better product. But ultimately that is less likely to get recycled; it’s less likely to be collected by a council.”

So one of the things we need to be careful with, as consumers, is to just go along with this anti-plastic rhetoric. We may miss opportunities to increase recycling by using plastic, and cause retailers to move over to packaging that is actually less likely to be recycled.