Glass recycling is a climate change nonsense

Camden’s glass recycling has become a climate change nonsense because bottle bank glass is now being mixed up rather than kept separated. As a result it's turned into aggregate for roads, which produces more carbon dioxide than recycling glass into bottles or making glass from raw materials.

If we want to do the worst possible thing for the environment with our glass recycling, then what we’re doing right now is that thing.

Camden collects glass in two ways - via kerbside mixed recycling boxes and via bottle banks. Glass is collected in doorstep recycling boxes which gets mixed up with other recycling in the back of a Veolia waste truck. The government calls it commingling – I call it commangling. Huge amounts of money and energy are spent trying to separate glass from paper unsuccessfully at the Greenwich Materials Reprocessing Facility (see photo). The paper ends up too contaminated with glass shards for UK paper makers to use. The glass ends up too fragmented and colour-mixed to be able to turn into bottles so it gets trucked to Yorkshire and turned into aggregate for roads.

Until recently bottle bank glass was sent to bottle makers in the UK and France. I was always careful to put my glass in the bottle banks because I knew I was doing the right thing to do in terms of the environment. Then one day London Waste (the waste disposal joint venture between the north London boroughs and waste company SITA) decided to replace separated glass transfer facilities at their Hornsey St depot in Islington with mixed glass ones. They didn’t tell Camden. They just did it. And so now virtually all of our glass is turned into aggregate rather than bottles. There is technology for separating different coloured bottles, but it doesn’t work if the glass is smashed up, which ours definitely is by the time it gets to the reprocessor.

I tabled a question about this at the North London Waste Authority meeting on 12 Dec calling for a return to bottle bank glass being separated by colour so that it can be sent to bottle makers. The Chief Executive of London Waste has now assured me that this issue is being looked at. I will continue campaigning for recycling to be first and foremost good for the environment rather than about moving tonnes of recycling from A to B.