I recently went on a visit to the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) in Greenwich, with members of the Council’s Sustainable Development Committee. The reason for the visit was to find out exactly what happens to the materials residents put in their recycling bins. Public confidence in recycling has taken a bit of a battering since recent TV documentaries showed unsorted waste being shipped to China. Residents have also expressed concern when their recycling is put into an ordinary waste van (the council uses the same vans for both recycling and non-recyclable waste).

After being collected from our green bins, all of the recyclable waste collected in Lewisham goes first to Hinkcroft Recycling in Deptford, where it is put into articulated lorries and transported to the Greenwich MRF. Once there it goes along an array of conveyor belts and crushing drums which separate paper, cardboard, glass, tins, plastic bottles and non-recyclable waste. The vast majority of the waste is sorted automatically, but pickers are employed to pull out anything that might contaminate the materials such as food waste. Between 93% and 95% of the waste sent there is separated into recyclate (the sorted material which is then sold on to reprocessors). The remaining 5-7% is residual waste which is returned to SELCHP and incinerated.

Apparently 60% of the volume of materials processed at the plant is paper and cardboard, 20% is glass and the remainder is plastic bottles and tins. At the moment the only plastic MRF can deal with is plastic bottles, not yoghurt pots, mushroom trays etc. This is apparently the only type of plastic there is currently a market for. Plastic bags also get stuck in the machines and have to be removed by hand.

It is one of the few MRFs in the country/world that is able to deal with glass. It does this by crushing it into small pieces which then fall through a mesh, while larger items such as newspapers go down a different chute. The downside of dealing with glass in this way is that it is not suitable to be recycled back into glass bottles, but is sold as aggregate. This reduces the amount of waste going to landfill and the amount of aggregate being quarried, but is arguably not as energy efficient as recycling it into glass (or better still reusing bottles, of course).

When we asked where the recyclate was reprocessed, we were told that the paper is exported to Malaysia, the plastic goes to China and the tins and cans are recycled within the UK. Apparently the material that is exported is put into shipping containers that have brought goods to the UK and would otherwise return empty. Clearly, this is far from ideal, but the market for recyclate in the UK is poorly developed, and the infrastructure to reprocess it is currently lacking. It is probably just about greener to ship recyclate to China for reprocessing than to landfill or incinerate it here, but the long-term aim must be to develop our domestic recycling industry.

Following the investigation into recycling in the borough by the Sustainable Development Committee (chaired by Brockley councillor Darren Johnson), residents can be confident that the contents of their green bins is being recycled. The committee made a number of recommendations to the Mayor and Cabinet, which were all accepted. These include placing special signs on vehicles to help residents differentiate between refuse and recycling collections, a public education campaign to inform people about what happens to their recycling and a commitment for Lewisham to work with the GLA and other bodies to push for the development of reprocessing facilities in London and the domestic market for recyclable materials.