Journey that begins send rubbish to be
PART TWO OF OUR BEHIND THE SCENES LOOK AT WHAT
You do your bit. You put everything that can be recycled into the appropriate bin.
You know that if it’s plastic, it’ll probably end up being made into a bottle or if it’s an old newspaper and magazine, one day it will be made into new paper. But how does it all happen? What is the recycling process really like?
If you live in Glasgow, the chances are your recycling will end up here, at Blochairn Materials Reclamation Facility, just off the M8. The facility is the end point for all the blue bins that are collected across the city and that means a lot of rubbish: some 17 to 35 trucks at the start of every week: 50-80 tons a day, 500 tons a week, 25,000 tons a year.
Once it’s been dropped off, the waste then goes through a sorting process, which is a mixture of automation and sorting by hand. The aim is to eliminate the stuff that cannot be recycled and, stage by stage, sort the rest into different categories so it can be recycled.
It’s loud, it’s messy, and for the staff who do it, hard work.
This is how it happens. IT’S first thing on Monday morning and Glasgow’s recycling trucks are delivering the rubbish they have collected from all over the city and dumping it into one big mountain of trash. Monday is the busiest day here, and January the busiest month, so there’s a lot to get through.
The mountain is huge – about 20ft high – and represents just three days of waste from Glasgow, from around 300,000 people. And this is just the stuff from the blue bins – about 75 per cent of the waste we throw away ends up in landfill.
In theory, all the rubbish that has arrived here this morning can be recycled but we can see straight away that there’s lots in this pile that shouldn’t be there: polystyrene, bin liners, wood, plastic cartons, children’s toys, an old tent, and hundreds of thousands of other unrecyclable items, which people have accidentally, carelessly or thoughtlessly chucked in the blue bins.
About 25 to 30 per cent of the material dropped off here cannot be recycled.
The staff also regularly find weird and gruesome things in the rubbish. Microwaves. Fire extinguishers. Brake pads. A dead snake. Two dead deer. A bag of dead rats. And on one occasion, an iPhone (the owner tracked it to the Blochairn facility and, luckily, the staff found it, after it had gone right through the machinery. The only damage? A tiny scratch on the front).
“If you can fit something in a bin, people will put it in a bin,” says Rolf Matthews, who is the waste manager here. “The biggest frustration is people putting wrong stuff in the bin, and it can be unpleasant wrong stuff.”
Standing in front of the huge pile of rubbish, councillor Anna Richardson, the city convener for sustainability and carbon reduction, says in some ways seeing so much waste is depressing, but at least something is being done.
“If it has to be somewhere, I’m glad it’s here and I’m glad we’re doing something, but we have to reduce the amount of stuff that we consume in the first place,” she says.
“This can’t carry on – it’s completely unsustainable.” NOW the real sorting begins. A huge mechanical loader picks the rubbish up and drops it into the first piece of machinery: a bag splitter, which will remove any plastic bags that are still around the rubbish. The second stage is to remove material which should go to landfill. The machine then sorts the material by size, separating any paper and cardboard.
The next stage is to sort the waste into different types, which the machine does in stages using different techniques. Magnets are used to separate out tins and cans; the machine also scans plastic to divide it into two categories: the opaque high-density polyethylene used in milk bottles, and the rest.
The machinery also sorts out the material that cannot be recycled, which is around a third of the total. It has probably been put there by people who are well-meaning or simply don’t understand the rules, but, if in doubt, check the sides of the blue bins where it is made clear what can and can’t be recycled. In Glasgow, you can put the following into the bins: newspapers, magazines, office paper and catalogues, phone directories, junk mail, food tins and drinks cans, aerosol cans, plastic bottles,