Trying to recycle the right way

I've spent a lot of time and effort over the last four years battling against recycling tonnage targets. They give councils an incentive to collect the maximum number of tonnes at the cheapest price. Our obligation stops there. We have no incentive to take the planet into account.

I've just been to a new Materials Reprocessing Facility (MRF), Bywaters at Bromley-in-Bow in East London. MRFs are supposed to separate recycling after councils have mixed it up in commingled (or commangled) collections. A huge amount of energy goes into trying to separate commingled recycling and a lot of manual effort as well.

It's much better than the last one I went to in Greenwich where they couldn't separate paper and glass. There the paper was so contaminated by glass shards that no British papermaker would accept it so we ended up paying people to ship it to the Far East where I guess it was burnt in furnaces. The Bywaters MRF can separate out glass which is a big step forward. And almost all the paper that Bywaters reprocess goes to British papermakers.

However it remains the case that we simply should not be sending glass to MRFs - everyone except the disabled or elderly should be putting it in on-street bottle banks. That way it goes straight to a bottlemaker. If you send it to a MRF as part of the commingled collection, most of it ends up as roadfill which is a complete nonsense. Think of energy that's used, and the CO2 that's created, trucking the recycling, putting it through a MRF, trucking it to a glass reprocessor, and turning it into aggregate. In environmental terms it would actually make more sense to put glass in a landfill site (because it's inert) than put it through a MRF.

The second good thing about the Bywaters MRF is that it can sort mixed plastics. It uses optical lasers to sort plastics out into PET, HDPE and the rest. The first two are sold as a resource. The third type - low grade mixed plastics - is also sold but it needs to go to a specialist plastics reprocessor for further sorting. We don't have any of those in the UK as far as I know.

Tetrapaks are still a headache - both for me and for Bywaters. They extract them by hand, then Tetrapak ship them to Sweden for reprocessing, or rather for burning mostly. The problem here is not Bywaters - it's us and what we're used to. Tetrapaks are part of modern life, part of the packaged up, throwaway culture. Tetrapak will make arguments like "it makes more sense to make a carton than a glass bottle" or "trucking Tetrapaks uses less energy than trucking glass bottles". They reckon they manage to separate some of the elements of the carton and reuse them. Me, I'm not convinced. As far as I can make out most of the carton simply goes into an energy from waste facility (an incinerator) in Sweden.

Camden is moving to a four stream system for recycling by April 2010 which has taken a long time but which I'm basically happy with:
1. Food waste - which will be anaerobically digested to produce biogas and compost;
2. Paper and card - which will be sent direct to a papermaker;
3. Plastics, metal and glass - although we will encourage residents to put their glass in the on-street bottle banks so that it goes straight to a bottlemaker;
4. Residual or black bag waste - but hopefully there won't be any of that!