TOT: shredded paper recycling

Put the window envelopes in with paper.

Better burnt than landfill.

The plastic recycling facilities are quite sophisticated. Nobody reads the number and triangle on the bag.

There was a short video on telly, about our plant, so there were pictures of it running and the stuff going around in circles. I don't really know, if by mass that is an effective diverter of waste. The plant cannot work on a load for too long, before it must be purged and another load of plastics is then considered. The smaller your plastic pieces, the more likely they are to go into the landfill.

Paul

"The plastic recycling facilities". I'm sure that's an accurate description of one such plant. Should we expect it to be true of _every_ plant in the UK?

I never expected ours to have any automation, so I was surprised at the article.

Ours used to have human sorters, because I was at some plant, and I was greeted by a whole crowd of people in outfits, sorting stuff.

The plastic plant has fewer humans, but not getting close to zero quite yet.

I think there is a lot of copy-cat activity, so if one region jumps on a bandwagon, others follow. Especially if one of the waste ID devices is relatively cheap to make.

The incentive here, is the cost of "building a new hole in the ground". Landfills are expensive. You have to dig them out and line them, to contain materials leaching from the pile. Our next one will cost around 450 million. Which is a lot, for a hole in the ground. The plastics sorting facility is likely to be in a different league on price. Most of it is conveyor belts. We deflect material from the landfill, to avoid paying that price.

Since there are no TV articles on the other sorting plants, I doubt those are nearly as fancy. The paper plant, it "grades" the materials. Cardboard is baled, as one type of output. Recycled typing paper, the nice white stuff, it might actually have some value. Otherwise, one of the problems with the paper facility, is nobody wants to buy the output. All the bog roll here, is made from new trees, for example. They have experimented in the past, with recycled content, but the latest report is they are using new trees for bog roll.

For any Al or Cu, there is a ready market. That sells well. People steal it out of the bins, before it even gets to the facility.

Paul

...by urban foxes, who rip them to shreds.

Only if they contain food or used nappies!

Waste food is collected in small buckets with a lockable lid. The bin man comes along with a large wheelie bin and empties each of the small buckets into it.

Very little waste food is put out for collection around my way.

a: I agree, but never going to happen (without junking millions of bins)

b: I agree, and they need to get on with that.

Stuff that's compostable here, such as spud peelings, gets composted. Other food waste (e.g. cooked or bones) is wrapped up in newspaper and put out weekly in the small lockable bin along with whatever type of large bin is due this week. I didn't put out the landfill bin this week as it has next to nothing in it. So it'll go out in two weeks time, most likely.

Personally I don't care too much if the blue bin, that has metal/glass/plastic, has all its plastic sent to an incinerator, provided that is generating energy. That at least means two usages for the plastic and also means it's not gone into landfill.

I'm sure most here know about the "mobius" symbol, with/without the various letter/number combinations for plastic/paper/card.

But I think many people assume the "green dot" is another symbol to say something can be recycled?

when often it means the exact opposite.