CLEAR OUT YOUR OLD ELECTRICALS AND YOU COULD WIN £100!

Are you having a clear out this spring? If you unearth any old, broken or unwanted electricals they could win you a cash prize. Dig them out and take them to one of Derbyshire County Council's household waste recycling centres for your chance to win one of fifteen £100 cash prizes.

From hair-dryers to hedge-trimmers, fairy lights to fridges and toasters to TVs, there's a wide range of household appliances you can take to Derbyshire County Council's recycling centres. From Monday 2 March until Sunday 5 April, you can exchange them for a golden ticket - which means you could be quids in.

Simply ask for your golden ticket from a member of staff at any of the county council's nine recycling centres, type in your unique ticket number online at www.derbyshire.gov.uk/electric and find out instantly if you're a winner. The more items you recycle, the more tickets you'll get.

Derbyshire County Council's Cabinet Member for Highways, Transport and Infrastructure Councillor Simon Spencer said: "It's a shocking fact that across the UK we throw away more than a quarter of the electrical items we buy instead of recycling them.

"Reducing waste and increasing recycling is one of our key pledges to help reduce carbon emissions. The carbon footprint is much lower when recycled materials are used than when things are manufactured from scratch.

"Our recycling contractors salvage precious metals and other valuable materials from the items residents bring us so that they can be recycled. For example one household iron contains enough steel to produce 13 steel cans.

"So please bring us those old electricals. We'll put them to good use and as an added bonus, you could win £100."

It costs Derbyshire council tax payers £43 million a year for the county council to deal with waste in Derbyshire which residents choose not to recycle. But if every Derbyshire household took just one electrical item to one of our recycling centres in March we could recycle an additional 318,000 appliances and help to cut these costs.

The competition prizes are part-funded by Recycling Lives - the contractor which works on behalf of the county council to collect and recycle electrical items taken to its recycling centres. The competition is only open to Derbyshire Residents.

Electrical goods can be exchanged for a golden ticket at the following recycling centres:

• Ashbourne (Mayfield Road)
• Bolsover (Buttermilk Lane)
• Buxton (Waterswallows Road)
• Glossop (Melandra Road)
• Ilkeston (Manners Avenue Industrial Estate)
• Loscoe (Heanor)
• Newhall (Swadlincote)
• Northwood (Darley Dale)
• Stonegravels (Chesterfield)

All electrical appliances are accepted including:

• coffee makers
• electric toothbrushes
• electric garden equipment
• fairy lights
• fridges, freezers and fridge-freezers
• game consoles
• irons
• kettles
• lamps
• laptops, tablets and PCs
• microwaves
• music systems
• phones
• power tools
• printers
• radios
• sat navs
• shavers
• slow cookers
• straighteners and hairdryers
• washers and dryers
• vacuums

For a full list of the other items you can take to the recycling centres and their locations: www.derbyshire.gov.uk/recyclingcentres

Please make sure all personal data has been removed from items such as laptops, mobile phones or tablets before you take them to a recycling centre.

If you have a broken electrical or other household items that you'd like to get repaired if possible take them along to one of Derbyshire's six repair cafes. Qualified volunteers aim to fix your items free of charge rather than them being thrown out www.derbyshire.gov.uk/repaircafes