Whenyou recycled...
IT REALLY MEANS TO GO GREEN
white envelopes, cardboard boxes, and packaging. And you cannot put in the following: plastic bags, foil, margarine tubs, glass bottles, brown envelopes, tetra pak cartons, paint tins or plant pots, or yoghurt pots.
Councillor Anne Richardson understands that people sometimes get it wrong. “Even in my house, we had been putting things into the bins thinking they were recyclable – I learned here that there were things that we should be putting in the general rubbish. Some people still don’t want to recycle but even among those that do, it can be complicated and I think we need to do everything we can to get that message across clearly.” HAVING been sorted by machine, the waste now arrives on two belts into a sorting room where some 14 staff sort the rubbish by hand. I have a go and it is not easy: the belts are fast-moving and the aim is to remove the tins and plastic from the paper and put the material in separate bins.
Quite often, the belt suddenly stops because there is a blockage in the machinery that has to be removed by hand. Otherwise, the belt keeps going for seven to eight hours a day.
One of the staff working today is Charlie Miller. “It’s a long day but I’m used to it,” he says. “I used to sweep the streets for a while, but I prefer this. A lot of guys don’t like it but I do. It’s not tiring, just boring. A lot of people are chucking out stuff they shouldn’t.”
His colleague, Steven McKay, 33, is the one who shows me the ropes. “It’s not hard and it’s not the worst job,” he says. “I’ve seen worse and dirtier jobs than this, like the bin lorries. I used to be on the bin lorries every day – that’s hard. And you are doing something for the planet, aren’t you? The pay is OK but there aren’t enough people.”
The staff tell me that, fully manned, this place should have 24 people – usually, there are around 14-17.
For Anna Richardson, this part of the process should act as a reminder for all of us about what recycling is all about. “There are guys who do this as their day job,” she says, “picking through the rubbish that we throw away and we should think a wee bit more about how we could make their job easier when we are in our kitchens.” NOW that the rubbish has been sorted by machine and then by hand, the material is dropped into several huge dumpsters. There is one for plastic, one for milk bottles and other bottles, one for tins, and one for the rest: all the stuff that cannot be recycled.
The material is then sorted into bales ready to be taken from Blochairn to the final stage. Paper is sent to a mill in England for reprocessing; aluminium is sent to a processing plant in Warrington where it is melted down and re-used; plastic goes to three different plants in England, where it is shredded, cleaned and re-used. Plastic tends to be re-used in non-food bottles; it can also be turned into clothes, like the yellow jackets we are wearing on the site.
As for the waste that cannot be recycled, that is exported to Scandinavia, where it is burned to produce electricity. At the moment this is something that cannot be done in Scotland, but that will change when a new facility at Polmadie in Glasgow opens. The £154m scheme is expected to divert 200,000 tonnes of waste from landfill each year, providing renewable energy that will power 22,000 homes.
At Blochairn, the bales of rubbish are sold on, which does earn Glasgow City Council some cash, although it is nowhere near enough to offset the total cost of dealing with the city’s rubbish.
The bales of milk bottles for example are sold for £240 a ton, but if people recycled better, meaning there was less contamination, they could get more.
Standing in front of the bales, Paul Clayton, the transfer station supervisor, tells me that, slowly but surely, we are getting better at recycling. “I think we are going in the right direction,” he says. “There are a lot more people recycling.”
But the problem as far as Councillor Richardson is concerned is that we are still not thinking enough about what happens to our waste. “As a society, we are really disconnected from our waste,” she says. “We put it in bins and then pretend it never happened or that we never created it.
“That cannot go on.”