Recycling

[pigface]

In my borough we are required to separate our recyclelable waste from other wastes.  All the recycleables (paper, plastic, metal) go into one bin together. Does anyone know how these are separated - obviously the ferrous metals can be separated using a magnet but does the rest of it have to get sorted by had? If so, it'd be a very tedious job.

[cassimer]

Our council sorts it by hand..... fun...

[THFCUK]

Where i live we have to put all the recycleable things in seperate bags for the bin men, ie one bag for plastic, paper etc. But the annoying thing about this is when the bin men come along then throw it in the same lorry and crunch it up (like the normal black bag one) and it all must get mixed up in there. so we seperate it for no reason in my eyes.  But if we don't seperate it they will not take our bags.

[KebabMeister]

There are huge sorting machines which can seperate virtually everything.  It's very expensive though so only the larger councils would probably have one/access to one.

[The Tiggster]

It is possible that your authority has access what is known as a materials reclamation centre, which is the glamourous name for a big conveyor belt that poor sods stand at & pick out the categories of recyclates that cannot be sorted by machine/magnet.

They cost on average 2 -3 million to build so it could be that several neighbouring authorities have clubbed together to buy & run one.

The reason the authorities decide to seperate for the householder is to obtain the highest rate in pure recyclates. Research has shown that householders are reluctant to spend hours a month seperating waste & prefer the easiest method possible.

[v64paul]

our council have the best answer. various bins and boxes to put all your s##t in, leave them on the kerbside on collection day then the binnies refuse to pick it up because the boxes contain "mixed refuse" yeah right.

[brachiopod]

The short answer is "yes, it's all sorted by hand".

As you say, ferrous content is extracted by magnet (steel tins/cans etc).

Domestic plastics are not usually worth sorting, apart from PET (poly ethylene terephthalate) - ie the big 'pop' bottles - even then it's low value and cannot again be used for 'food use'. (The highest value PET is called 'pre-consumer scrap' which comes in bulk from the plastic bottle manufacturers and is made up of all their rejects.)

Paper collected from domestic 'mixed recycling' sources (where you put all your re-cyclables in one bag) are all-too-often contaminated to be worth salvaging. (Contaminants in this case can be anything from broken glass mixed up in the waste, baked beans from unwashed cans, or 'cat litter' where people have used newspaper to line litter trays and then re-cycle it !!) Where newspaper etc is collected separately, and therefore presented 'in bulk', then yes, it is recycled.

Large scale waste producers (such as supermarkets) can supply higher quality material for re-cycling as the waste is less often contaminated. (ie they supply a whole pile of single grade cardboard or another of polyethene)

From the landfill sites I've visited that operate RDWS (recyclable domestic waste salvage) it is all sorted by magnet first, then hand-picked for aluminium, PET, glass and paper. Though if the paper is at all dirty, or comes down the line as single sheets (and not in bulk) it is passed over and just ends up in the rest of the landfill.

Moral of the story, is that if for every 99 conscientious recyclers, it only takes 1 person to put any old sh1te in the bag for the whole batch to be written off.

[Phantaxus]

It is sorted by hand. In our borough they have said that only certain types of plastic can be recycled. There is a neighboring borough that has said that all types of plastic can be recycled. when the recycling centre gets a batch of waste from this borough the have to rota on extra people to sort it.

[OBonio]

Yup, if/when our recyclable collection happens (still trying to suss this out!!), there's a group of 3 or 4 men who seperate the stuff out manually into the mystery machine.  It really does look like a bad job.