• CBBC presenter Mwaka Mudenda, known as Mwaksy, has been named Recycle Week 2o23 ambassador for ‘The Big Recycling Hunt’, which promises to shine a light on items that people forget to recycle.

• Mwaksy will help raise awareness of the importance of recycling among children aged 5 to 11, throughout Recycle Week, 16th to 22nd October 2023

• Oakdale Junior School who has been selected as the first-ever Recycling Youth Ambassadors, will be visited by WRAP’s CEO Harriet Lamb and Mwaksy Mudenda to celebrate their achievement.

MONDAY 16th OCTOBER: This year marks the 20th anniversary of Recycle Week, the annual campaign to raise awareness of the importance of recycling. To celebrate this milestone, Recycle Now has appointed beloved CBBC and Blue Peter presenter Mwaksy to help drive change.

Mwaksy will lead this year's Recycle Week campaign (October 16-22) by participating in activities to raise awareness about recovering lost recyclables.

At just 25 years old, Mwaksy became Blue Peter’s 39th presenter during lockdown, and has spent the last couple of years on our screens engaging a young audience of creative minds – something she hopes to take into Recycle Week.

Mwaksy will visit the environmental champions of Oakdale Junior School in London on October 17th. These schoolchildren have been chosen as the first-ever Recycling Youth Ambassadors for Recycle Week after impressing with their deep passion for recycling and profound desire to ignite change within their local community and beyond.

During the visit, Mwaksy will celebrate their achievement and rally the children to educate others about recycling.

As the campaign’s Recycling Youth Ambassadors for 2023, the class will play a pivotal role in inspiring participation in "The Big Recycling Hunt,” and encouraging other eco-friendly practices, helping others understand how to take care of the planet.

Harriet Lamb, CEO of WRAP, the NGO behind Recycle Week, expressed her excitement: 'We are truly delighted to welcome Mwaksy as our ambassador for Recycle Week 2023 as well as students from Oakdale Junior School as our official Recycling Youth Ambassadors.

Recycling can become a daily, fun family-friendly activity. Our ambassadors will help us inspire families with children of all ages to participate in helping us make recycling second-nature for all of us.”

Mwaksy commented: “I am delighted to be the face of Recycle Week 2023’s campaign, ‘The Big Recycling Hunt’. Recycling is a core passion of mine as a CBBC presenter, and identifying items that are commonly missed or forgotten from the recycling bin is an element of recycling practice that I believe is invaluable to teach our children as they look out for our planet.

“I have been inspired by the work Recycle Now carries out all year round to improve our environment and am very proud to have the opportunity to lend my support to this important annual campaign and visit the Recycling Youth Ambassadors at Oakdale Junior School.”

Carley Smith, Head of School at Oakdale Junior School, said: “We are so proud of our students for being selected as Recycling Youth Ambassadors.

“We are committed to being a voice for the planet, promoting awareness about the importance of recycling, reducing waste, and adopting eco-friendly practices. By raising awareness of ‘The Big Recycling Hunt’ we aim to help create a future where recycling isn’t just a habit, but a way of life —a future where every plastic cleaning product, toiletry bottle, and food tin gets recycled, leaving a cleaner, healthier planet for generations to come.”

"The Big Recycling Hunt", the central theme of this year's campaign, promises to shine a bright spotlight on items that don’t make it to the recycling bin." This nationwide hunt aims to engage children and families in the quest to find 'lost recyclables' that too often find their way into the rubbish bin. By focusing on commonly missed-captured items such as empty aerosols, plastic cleaning product bottles, plastic toiletry

bottles, plastic pots and tubs, and food tins, the Week wants to foster a deeper understanding of recycling in the younger generation.

Beyond spreading awareness, ambassadorship enables students to develop real-world skills like leadership, communication, and active citizenship. As a reward for their efforts, the class will receive £250 to invest in sustainability resources and experiences.

Major brands are putting their support behind Recycle Week by sponsoring including Arla Foods, Boots, Danone, Britvic and Tesco.

Recycling doesn’t have to be confusing. To find out more about Recycle Week and The Big Recycling Hunt visit The Action Pack - https://schools.recyclenow.com.

-ENDS-

About Recycle Week:

• First staged in 2004, Recycle Week is now the UK’s largest national annual recycling campaign. It’s a week where citizens, media, local governments, and brands come together to meet one goal; to galvanise everyone into recycling more of the right things, more often. www.recyclenow.com/RecycleWeek

About Recycle Now:

• An established brand, Recycle Now encourages and motivates citizens to recycle more things, more often, from around the home. Using ground-breaking, robust insights and behaviour change theory, we develop interventions and campaigns to motivate citizens to change their behaviour.

About WRAP:

• WRAP is a climate action NGO working around the globe to tackle the causes of the climate crisis and give the planet a sustainable future. Our vision is a thriving world in which climate change is no longer a problem. We believe that our natural resources should not be wasted and that everything we use should be re-used and recycled. We bring together and work with governments, businesses and individuals to ensure that the world’s natural resources are used more sustainably. Our core purpose is to help tackle climate change and protect our planet by changing the way things are produced, consumed and disposed of.

• Our work includes: UK Plastics Pact, Courtauld Commitment 2030, Textiles 2030 and the citizen campaigns Love Food Hate Waste, Love Your Clothes, Clear on Plastics and Recycle Now. We run Food Waste Action Week and Recycle Week.

Recycle Week Sponsors

For the fourth year running, major brands are putting their support behind Recycle Week by sponsoring to help fund it including Arla Foods, Boots, Danone, Britvic and Tesco.

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