Here’s what happens to your

WITH Cardiff producing a whopping 42,000 tonnes of recyclable waste every year, you can imagine it takes a big operation to sort it all out every day.

Separating your plastics, paper, glass and other recyclables from your black bins may seem a mundane weekly task – and just a drop in the ocean in terms of the huge environmental issues which face our planet.

But staff down at the Materials Recycling Facility in Lamby Way are keen to impress that what you do with your recycling does make a big difference.

It goes a long way to determining what can and can’t be recycled, and to the council’s coffers as its budgets get more and more stretched.

To demonstrate this, and to show off an impressive new piece of kit which should make the jobs of MRF staff much easier, we were given a behindthe-scenes look at what happens to your recycling waste after it is collected.

This is what we learned... The scale of the task of the staff at the MRF could – on paper – seem daunting. They face sorting through up to 400 tonnes of recyclable waste at any one time.

And much of this waste is contaminated by people chucking out things like syringes, food, dirty nappies, items such as suitcases and even, sometimes, human excrement with their recyclables

Lucky, then, that they now have an new piece of kit to help them.

An auto-sorter, which cost £650,000, was installed last week. It’s task is to sort through all the plastics and paper from the waste – which are then compiled into bales then sold onto commercial companies.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the auto-sorter is that it can be told to identify specific types of items, such as milk or drinks bottles, and separate them out automatically.