East Berkshire Green Party

David Young, the Green Party General Election candidate for Bracknell, has been against the policy of Bracknell Forest Borough Council’s practice of commingled waste from the outset. Unfortunately it appears he has been proved right according to the Friends of the Earth local group.

Notice from Bill Dowling (FoE) follows:

RECYCLING CONTAMINATION

I attended a RE3 (see www.re3.org.uk) Stakeholder meeting on 25th January, on behalf of both the SRA and Bracknell FOE. It was reported that they are having serious problems with excessive contamination of the recycling materials entering the MRF (Materials Recycling Facility) at the Smallmead waste site in Reading. I know that Sandhurst residents are pretty good at recycling, and probably are the least likely to be causing these problems, but I feel I must report this back to you. The MRF machinery that sorts out all the mixed waste that we residents put in our blue wheely bins is pretty good, but it has only been designed to do the job well when the stuff coming out of our blue bins matches this simplified list of 4 things:

• Paper and Cardboard
• Food and Drinks Cans
• Plastic Bottles
• Empty Aerosol Cans

Anything else is a problem, and can even “gum up the works”! Machine down-time is wasteful. More energy is needed to shut down and restart the machine to unclog it and repair minor damage. More serious damage can lead to a complete shut-down of the plant and recycling being sent to another plant in the UK. While there has to be some manual intervention by human operatives at various stages, this would be reduced if the correct items were placed in the recycling bins. The operatives work very hard to remove contamination so that the recycling can be forwarded to reprocessors and made into new items. Contamination is a big problem and does nothing to help the recycling process or the operatives in their jobs.

There are 5 problem areas in priority order:

1.PLASTIC BAGS. Loose plastic bags of any sort MUST NOT to be put in! And, please NEVER EVER, put your recycleables inside a plastic bag, whether pre-sorted or not!

Plastic bags not only clog up the machinery but when they do get through the machinery they can cause the sorted materials to be classed as contaminated.

2.PLASTICS OTHER THAN BOTTLES. ONLY plastic bottles can be handled by the machinery, all other plastic items (incl. bottle tops!) have to be manually removed.

So it is a huge help if bottle tops are removed, and the bottles are crushed too!

We do know how you feel about all the other plastic packaging, but there is still insufficient demand from any plastic processing companies to justify recycling them.

(I plan to explain more about this in a dedicated article in the next magazine.)

3. TETRAPAKS. These cannot be recycled with our mixed paper and cardboard!

They are made from a complex laminated paper, metal foil and plastic material, so they too have to be manually picked out. The only place Tetrapaks can be recycled is at Longshot lane and at a few Supermarkets: e.g. Waitrose in Sandhurst, from whence they then have to be shipped all the way to Sweden for recycling!

4. GLASS BOTTLES. These must not be put in. They get broken! They can and often do damage the machinery, and are dangerous to operatives safety. Pieces of broken glass also contaminate the sorted materials, heavily reducing their value.

5. PUTRESCIBLES. Food waste of any sort whatsoever MUST NOT be put in, and certainly not hidden in a plastic bag! Worse still, of course, is any form of animal waste. You wouldn’t want to work with machinery handling this stuff would you?

Bill Dowling, Recycling Officer, 2nd Feb 2010