RECYCLING COLLECTIONS

2021-01-28 16:48:13

Recycling collection services vary across the country. The factors that influence these services include whether the area is urban or rural, the different types of housing and the facilities available to process your recycling.

Broadly there are three scheme types: 

'Kerbside sort' schemes where recyclables are sorted into their respective materials on the lorry at the kerbside;

'Two-stream' where paper and card is collected in one compartment and the containers (cans, plastic bottles and glass bottles and jars) are collected in another compartment; and

'Co-mingled' collections where all your recyclables are put into one compartment on the lorry before being taken to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) and sorted.

How is it recycled?

After the materials have been collected and sorted, they are sent for re-processing.

Once collected and sorted, recycled materials become valuable commodities in the worldwide market. There are many recycling factories here, reprocessing million of tonnes of material every year. For example:

all of the newsprint used in the UK contains around 78% of recycled paper;

all of the organic (garden and kitchen) waste we collect is recycled here, usually quite close to where it is collected; and

we currently recycle 6 billion plastic bottles – that's the same as each person in Britain recycling 99 bottles a year!

Environmental impact 

Whilst recycled materials are valuable commodities in the worldwide market and are financially important; recycling is good for the environment too.  It makes best use of our limited natural resources. Recycling is a real success story and we should be proud of what we have achieved as a nation – but there is still much more we can do