Dirty secrets in recycling
Camden residents’ conscientiously sorted doorstep recycling boxes are simply rebundled and sent abroad.
Every item of paper placed in Camden’s recycling bins is sent to Malaysia, Indonesia, India or China. All of the borough’s waste plastic goes to China.
This is according to figures released to the New Journal this week under Freedom of Information rules. The council is locked into a seven-year, £16 million a year contract with waste company Veolia.
But it is the council’s cost-cutting policy of lumping all types of waste together, that requires the ‘contaminated’ recycling can only be processed abroad.
UK failing
A Camden Town Hall press official said: “Most UK waste contractors use facilities in Asia to reprocess some materials - for example, plastic into other products.” Apparently half of all the UK’s recyclable material is sent abroad for reprocessing. This is because there are not currently enough facilities in the UK to reprocess and re-manufacture all of the materials that we wish to recycle.
exporting east
Many recycling experts feel that this exporting of recyclable amterials is a good thing. The ships that bring China’s vast number of imports to the UK would return home empty if they not carrying used British plastics to be recycled into plastic goods. Similarly, discarded British paper helps Asia’s roaring manufacturing economy.
A Friends of the Earth spokes-woman said: “It is important to recycle as much as we can in the UK. But we recognise that a global market exists for the most-in-demand materials.”
and back again!
A few months ago, BBC current affairs series “Inside Out”, reported that British recycling processors are importing plastics from continental Europe. Managers at the Linpac company blame the quality of co-mingled doorstep collection schemes adopted by many local councils.
“At the moment this valuable resource is worth more if we export it to China than leave it in the domestic market. The market’s very strong for this mixed plastic and we haven’t got a secure outlet in the UK.”
Another processing company, Berryman Glass, collects glass waste on behalf of the container industry. It complains that co-mingled collections are causing it “major problems”, because of the quality of glass is less reliable than from material collected in recycling banks.
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