BBC London broadcast a piece on Camden's recent recycling audit which you can see here. There’s a key point that was wrong in the report. Commingling - mixing all our recycling up together and then trying to separate it later - is more “efficient” in that it allows us to collect more recycling in one truck and therefore leads to fewer truck movements. But it's not necessarily more efficient in terms of increasing recycling rates. We assume commingling means residents recycle more but we actually have no evidence of this because we started collecting plastic bottles and cardboard when we introduced commingling in April 2006 which is probably a big part of why our recycling rate went up.
Camden’s recycling audit – which I instigated and which is, I believe, the only study done by a UK council of energy used in recycling – showed that commingling the way we do it is the least environmentally friendly thing we can do with our recycling because of the Greenwich MRF which we send it to for separation.
The audit also suggested some possible ways to adapt it which is what we’re now looking at eg collecting paper and cardboard separately. Officers are now preparing an options paper for the autumn so hopefully we'll see a change by the end of the year. I think we owe it to residents and to the planet to make our recycling as environmentally friendly as possible.
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