If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘what’s the point in recycling’ – you’re not alone.
Day in, day out, more headlines pop up questioning how effective recycling really is in a where the climate change clock is ticking.
Even the big environmental charities like Greenpeace are telling us that recycling isn’t as good as we’ve been told to believe it is – but if that’s the case, is there any point in doing it at all?
In Cumbria alone we generate over 184,000 tonnes of waste every year – that’s the same weight as over four million Herdwick sheep.
That waste doesn’t just disappear once it goes in the bin, it has to go somewhere, and at the moment, the options are to recycle, or to throw it away.
So, in an effort to figure out if recycling is really worth it, we paid a visit to one of Cumbria’s two big recycling facilities, where we were given a behind-the-scenes look at what actually happens to our recycling in Cumbria.
So, where does our recycling go in Cumbria?
Recycling in Cumbria is looked after by Cumbria Waste Group, who are part of a 25-year contract with Cumberland Council, Westmorland and Furness Council and Biffa to help manage all of Cumbria’s waste.
They look after the county’s 14 Household Waste Recycling Centres – or HWRC’s where bulky items like electronics are able to be properly recycled.
They also handle commercial recycling from businesses like restaurants and hotels and are responsible for where our kerbside and drop-off point recycling ends up.
You might refer to your local recycling centre as ‘the tip’ – but that’s a term that people working in Cumbria’s world of waste say is totally inaccurate.
Around 70 per cent of items and waste products sent to household waste recycling centres are taken away to reprocessing plants, where they are then broken down and recycled.
General rubbish collection also takes place at a HWRC and hazardous materials like batteries are collected.
This also includes waste oil, textiles, building rubble and waste.
Garden waste is taken to a composting site, where it is turned into nutritious soil conditioner.
Kerbside recycling, the stuff we do at home, is collected by council waste teams who then take it to one of two Material Recycling Facilities based in Cumbria.
These facilities are located at Hespin Wood in Carlisle and Sowerby Wood in Barrow.
The two sites also separately process the county’s black bin waste and manage our three remaining landfill sites.
But recycling wise, in a nutshell, all our kerbside and drop-site recycling is sent to the county’s Material Recycling Facilities – known as MRFs and pronounced as murfs, which process 90 tonnes of recycling per day.
MRFs process the things we recycle from home like plastic and cardboard and get them ready to be sold off to third parties who can reuse them.
Recycled materials are generally sold where there is a market for them – both councils in Cumbria try to keep them in this country but occasionally they are sent abroad.
What actually happens at a Material Recycling Facility?
Metal cans and tins, plastic bottles and containers, cardboard, paper and glass are all recycled in Cumbria’s MRF facilities.
These facilities only work with kerbside or drop-site recycling and commercial recycling.
Recycling done at household waste recycling centres is reprocessed separately – which means you cannot put your toaster in your kerb-side tin can recycling, as it is too big for the MRF to process.
Once the recycling is collected from our homes by council refuse collection trucks, it is then taken to one of the county’s two MRF sites.
It might look as though your recycling is being mixed in with your black bin waste – but modern refuse collection trucks have separate compartments inside them for recycling and black bin waste.
The MRF site is essentially a giant warehouse with a large blue elevated piece of machinery (the MRF itself) that sorts and separates our recycling on a series of conveyor belts.
There are different areas of this warehouse for our recycling to be emptied into before it is put into the machinery in smaller batches.
These separate areas allow for large or visible contaminants to be spotted and removed – this includes things like food covered items or generally unrecyclable things like plastic bags.
Once the piles are mostly contaminant-free, a small scoop is dropped it into a hopper, where the sorting process begins.
Kerb-side recycling that is pre-sorted makes this process much easier and the cleaner the material is the more value it has.
How is recycling actually sorted and separated?
The MRF is able to sort and separate recycling using different screening techniques.
Once a batch of recycling is loaded into the MRF, it is dropped large feed hoppers, where it is separated out based on density.
It then goes to pre-sort station, where two staff members look for large, bulky items and contaminants.
The mechanical separation equipment then takes over and is able to extract paper, card and glass.
Remaining materials including plastics, aluminium and cans are then separated into separate product streams using things like magnets and eddy currents.
Plastics are separated out into three grades (or types) – this includes milk bottle plastic, bleach bottle plastic, and yogurt pot plastic.
The machine can also separate the plastics based on colour and are smart enough able to remove labels from packaging.
Coloured plastic can only be turned back into coloured plastic – and the machine is also able to sort plastics optically into different colours where it needs to.
Each grade of plastic also has a different end value.
The separated products are then bailed, using a bailer, which squashes them into cubes, where they are then sold to third parties who then process the material into pellets for re-use.
So, why should I bother sorting out my recycling if they can do most of it at their end?
While the machines can sort based on weight, colour and more – there are limitations to what it can do.
It can’t mass clean old jars caked in dried pasta sauce or juice bottles covered in sticky residue and wine bottles that still have their aluminium screw top on them also cannot be separated in the MRF.
Attempting to recycle something covered in food waste is also a no-go.
Food waste can clog, or damage machinery and it contaminates recyclable material.
For example, a pizza box may seem like the perfect recycling candidate, but if it’s covered in cheese and grease, it’s contaminated.
If that cardboard were to be broken down for reuse, it would be impure due to yeast growth which impacts paper quality and effectively makes it worthless.
Stray food waste that gets into our recycling can also contaminate clean recycling and render it unable to be used.
The MRF also cannot break down large objects, like deckchairs, anything big should go to a household waste recycling centre.
While you might think putting larger objects out in your kerb-side recycling won’t do any harm – one large object that accidentally ends up in the MRF and onto its conveyor belt system can cause the entire facility to stop.
In Hespin Wood, one staff member recalled a deckchair accidentally finding its way onto the conveyor belts, causing the facility to come to a halt for 45 minutes.
At the more serious end, stray batteries or vapes thrown in with recycling can result in fires in refuse trucks or in the facility and put real people at risk.
I didn’t know I couldn’t recycle certain things – what can and can’t I recycle?
There are quite a few myths to bust around what can and can’t be recycled.
A lot of the time, it’s not as simple as just separating out tin cans and clean cardboard.
For example – can you recycle an aerosol can? What about a camping gas canister? Or broken glass cookware? Or foil crisp packets?
Not sure? Don’t worry, we break down exactly what you can and can’t recycle in Cumbria here.
Okay, but once it’s processed, where does my recycling eventually end up?
Most of the things we recycle are turned directly back into its original product in a process known as closed loop recycling.
This means that a plastic bottle will be made back into a plastic bottle.
Once the products are separated, they are then bundled and squashed into compressed squares and sold to third parties for processing, where they are turned into clean pellets of plastic or cardboard to create new products.
Contaminated recycling, like pizza boxes, is diverted from landfill and sent to a Mechanical Biological Treatment facility, two of which are on site next to Cumbria’s MRF facilities.
But does it all just go to landfill? Read more about where our black bin waste ends up here.
Some items, like Arla milk bottles, are sent back to their original companies, where they are turned back into the same product.
If I recycle, does it really make a difference then?
There is a lot of confusing and conflicting information on the internet as to whether or not recycling is worth it.
When it comes to national issues like plastic pollution, it’s true that Greenpeace say recycling alone is not an effective method to address it.
Paper, cardboard and metals like tin cans are all recycled at a high rate, but plastic can only be recycled so many times before it is worthless and must be incinerated or end up in landfill.
There are also certain kinds of plastic like plastic wrap and shopping bags that are unable to be recycled and have to go straight to incineration.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth recycling at all.
On a local level, recycling helps support our area financially and it’s considered much better option than just burning everything or sending it all to landfill, which is considered not environmentally friendly.
Nick Blake, who manages the contract between the councils, Biffa and CWM, said: “A lot of people think I’m only one person what impact can I have?
“But we need collaborative action to make these processes work.
“We are used to a standard of living where we throw things away and don’t worry about it, but it is not sustainable.
“Climate change is real, and this stuff really does matter and it really does make a difference.”
