What happens to your recyclable waste?

29 January 2023

Green Cllr Dave Brookes is the City Council Cabinet Member for Environmental Services, which includes waste collection (note that waste disposal is the responsibility of the County, not the City Council).

A question that he is often asked is:

“What actually happens to the plastic and other materials that we put in our household recycling boxes/bins?”.

Dave said:

“The plastics data I have for Lancashire in 2021/22 is that 83% of collected plastic by weight went for recycling, whereas 6% went to landfill and 11% to energy from waste (incineration). The 17% losses are down to contamination. Lancashire County Council says that all its recyclable plastics are reprocessed in the UK.

“The figures above are very different to those emailed to participants at the end of the ‘Big Plastic Count’, which stated 11% recycled, 16% sent abroad, 25% landfilled, 48% incineration. I contacted them and established that these were national average figures, covering all plastics (whether recyclable or not), measured by weight.

“Plastic waste is a massive problem and recycling certainly isn’t the top of the waste hierarchy. It’s much better to avoid creating the waste in the first place, and everyone can help by trying not to buy things that are made of, or packaged in, plastic. But for unavoidable plastic waste, recycling is certainly better than landfill or incineration.”

In case you want to know more about the different waste streams and the economics of recycling:

1. The value of recyclables fluctuates considerably, but some high value materials (e.g. metals) are sold, whereas County pays for some other materials to be reprocessed, but at a lower cost than disposal to landfill or incineration. Some materials can straightforwardly be processed into more or less the same thing (closed loop), whereas others can only be made into a lower grade product.
2. All kerbside recycling + most bring-site recycling in the district is taken to the County Council’s waste transfer station at Middleton, just off the Bay Gateway. Loads that are visibly contaminated* with significant quantities of non-recyclables are rejected at that point and will be diverted into the residual waste stream.
3. Commingled recycling (i.e. the metals/glass/plastics stream) is then loaded into larger wagons and taken down the motorway to an automated sorting facility at Leyland, which separates it into glass, aluminium, steel, and five different types of plastic (which are compressed into large bales).
4. Paper & cardboard gets taken straight to a paper mill for sorting & processing.
5. Tetrapaks are collected by a third party as part of an industry sponsored scheme. Work is ongoing to try to persuade a local paper mill to add sorting facilities so that tetrapaks can be collected in the paper & cardboard stream (as already happens in some areas, e.g. Greater Manchester).
6. Textile recycling goes to a third party sorting facility. Lancaster Sewing Cafe has done some research on what happens to it next, and it turns out that much of it gets shipped to Africa, where it either wrecks local clothing industry or ends up in landfill.

* Contaminated here means recyclables that are not clean enough or contain non-recyclable materials that are likely to cause chaos at the sorting plant.

More info can be found on Lancashire County Council’s website:  https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/lancashire-insight/environment/household-recycling-municipal-waste-and-fly-tipping/

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