Last updated 15:28, Thursday, 10 July 2008

EVER wondered where your waste goes? DOBORAH KERMODE Finds out

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WHEN you’ve rushed round recycling rubbish and sorting stuff for salvaging, ever thought what happens to it next?

You’d be surprised at how many miles it travels, how many firms are involved in shifting it, and what happens to it all when it reaches its destination.

We all know that the dark grey and black bins go straight to landfill – and that councils are pushing to get us to throw less into them because they are running out of landfill spaces to dump the rubbish, and, of course, for personal environmentally-friendly reasons.

Instead we are expected to sort and salvage our leftovers into things that our councils can recycle for us, a list that varies, depending on where we live.

Some councils run a door to depot service as an encouragement – giving us boxes to fill with stuff like newspapers, bottles and cans. Most will provide a green or brown bin for garden waste like grass cuttings and uprooted weeds, which they will take away.

Cumbria County Council organises – in the bigger towns – salvage sites full of skips so that households have somewhere to dump all the items people decide to throw out every spring clean.

In Barrow, street care manager Alan Barker runs the borough’s recycling operation, overseeing collection of glass, cans, paper and green waste from the kerbside and from the 19 salvage banks at supermarkets, car parks and club premises.

Sita wagons fetch glass from the kerbside and store it at their Salthouse Road depot in 25-tonne piles of white or coloured bottles. A variety of haulage contractors take it away to Barnsley firm Glass Recycling, where it is processed either into bottles or glass ingots for making other glass objects.

Mr Barker said: “The public has the misconception that the council’s glass recycling is a money maker.

“We get £90 for each of those 25-tonne loads taken away in a wagon, and the haulage contractors charge us £380 to take it away.”

Glass from the community bottle banks is picked up direct by Glass Recycling, Barnsley. Sita picks up cans from both the roadside and banks, after which they go to Solid Cast at Hyde, Manchester, which provides its own haulage.

“That just about breaks even,” said Mr Barker. “They get recycled into parts for cars, aeroplanes and trains, or just made into more cans. The whole point of the operation is that it doesn’t cost as much energy to re-process glass or cans or anything else as it does to make things from new.”

All paper for recycling (mainly newspaper) is stored at the Sita depot and collected by H Wicks of Sowerby Woods, Barrow. The majority then goes to a Kimberly-Clark site in Flint, Wales, to be made into tissue and toilet roll. Wicks also collects cardboard, cans and glass from the recycling banks.

Wicks’ managing director David Wick said: “We pick the contaminants out, bale it and bulk it up and take it to the reprocessors, using our own transport.”

The firms employs 25 people full-time on recycling. Plastic is collected by P & W, based at Sowerby Woods, from the recycling banks, and sent all over England. Gordon Peaker, managing director, said: “We partially sort it and sell it on to other recycling companies, depending on who gives the best price.”

At the moment it goes mainly to Loughborough, Manchester, Mansfield and the south coast, with a small amount going all the way to China.

“It comes back as bin lids, plastic tables and chairs – all non-sterile stuff. They can’t clean it to a high enough spec for companies who make drinks bottles and things like that,” Gordon added.

That could all change, however. Gordon has just found a company in London that believes it will be able to completely sterilise recycled plastic. P & W employs 13 staff, mixed part and full time. Then there is green waste – more than 40 per cent of Barrow borough households have been given a brown bin for their garden rubbish.

“All that goes to Sink Fall Farm on Rakesmoor Lane to make compost,” said Mr Barker. He’s very proud of the fact that 3,082 tonnes of garden waste was collected last year, especially as Sink Fall has at last – after a year of trying – got a licence to show its compost is of a high enough grade to sell to the public.

The firm employs five skip sorters, two yard operatives, two drivers and the management team – 14 people in all. In South Lakeland, the district waste and development manager Rob Kitchen manages the door-to-depot service which collects green waste from some areas and paper, glass and cans from all.

He also oversees the Furness and Cartmel area’s 13 recycling banks, placed in a variety of places, including an auction mart, a racecourse and leisure centres.

They handle all the above plus plastic, cardboard and textiles. Mr Kitchen and his staff are currently celebrating sending more stuff for recycling than they are burying in the ground.

He said: “For the first time ever in South Lakeland we have recycled more waste than we have sent to landfill in one month. Thank you to all the residents of South Lakeland for helping us reach a recycling rate of 53 per cent.”

In Furness and Cartmel glass collected by the district is transported to Ellesmere Port where it is crushed before being reprocessed into new bottles or used to make kitchen workshops and shiny garden pebbles. A very small amount goes to surface roads in France.

Cans are transported to either Barrow or Lancaster before going to recycling plants where they are separated into different metals to make parts for fridges, motorbikes, cars and aeroplanes.

As in Barrow, paper goes to Kimberly-Clark in Wales, and plastic bottles and bags to P & W in Barrow. Some green waste is carted by South Lakeland vehicles down to Sink Fall, Barrow, to be composted down, while the rest is taken by Sita, to Salt Ayre, Lancaster. This former landfill site is now the main recycling centre for the city.

In the Millom area, Copeland’s waste services manager Janice Carroll oversees two large and four small recycling sites, as well as a black box and green waste kerbsite collection service. Most of the items go to Lillyhall, Distington, to be sorted and sent for processing, while green waste goes to Hespin Wood, Carlisle to be turned into compost.

Finally, Cumbria’s waste prevention manager Martin Allman oversees all four household waste recycling centres in the area, where drivers queue for the treat of the week – chucking all their carefully sorted hand-ons into the appropriate skip.

This is where people meet the workers who help with big loads, take corrosives to store safely and climb into the skips to re-sort metals and timber into separate types for different firms to take away.

I’m told the one annoyance in their happy life down at the salvage yards is when would-be recyclers can’t be bothered to sort mixed bags and end up dumping it all in the mixed waste skip. That goes to landfill, which defeats the whole object.

The situation is complex at the HWRCs. Mr Allman said: “It is subject to change – the markets for certain materials are very fluid, especially with the level of development in China and India, who are taking so much metal for construction.” Metals, clean wood, batteries, oil, TVs, fridges, fluorescent tubes and even rubble are all processed by a host of different recycling firms in Cumbria, and then sold on.

Gas cylinders are returned to the makers and dirty wood used as fuel in Lockerbie. Paper, cardboard, plastics, green waste and glass are all handled the same as in the districts and boroughs. The HWRC salvage skips are based at Barrow’s Project Furness site, Grange Guides Lot, Millom’s Redhills Quarry and Ulverston’s Morecambe Road. Barrow and Ulverston are now open seven days a week, 8am to 6pm.

Wherever our recycled rubbish ends up, whether it’s Manchester, Chichester or even China, it’s safe to say that salvaging and re-using has become big business, bringing in money not so much for the councils but for the hauliers and manufacturers who pay to take it away.

Every item that our councils in Cumbria collect for recycling helps keep firms in business, earns wages for workers and comes back as a new product to be used, while helping to protect the environment.