RESIDENTS are being urged to go green and hit the bottle banks.

After all that festive cheer, people are being asked to give their empty glass bottles a new lease of life instead of turfing them out with household rubbish and sending them to landfill sites.

John Collis, pictured, director of waste management company Onyx Environmental, said: "At Christmas the amount of glass going to landfill increases considerably. Every year in Hampshire alone some 23,000 tonnes of glass goes to landfill when it could be recycled."

Bottles and glass jars can be recycled at supermarket and pub car park sites across Hampshire as well as at 26 household waste recycling centres.