What happens to your waste?
Ever wondered what really happens to your black-bin rubbish or to all those milk bottles you throw in the recycling box? Content Director Maxine Briggs investigates
At the crack of dawn on a Tuesday morning I find myself heading westbound on a train from my home in London to Avonmouth, Bristol. I am off to follow my rubbish.
I consider myself a dedicated recycler but sometimes I do wonder if the extra care is worth it. Doesn’t it just end up in landfill? And what happens to my black-bin waste?
To get some answers, I’m visiting two sites, a Materials Recycling Facility, which processes recycling and an Energy From Waste Centre, which deals with rubbish waste. Recycling and waste disposal is a multi-billion pound industry and waste company Suez does a lot of it, with
300 sites dotted around the
UK. At Avonmouth, they process the waste from six London boroughs along with the surrounding areas of Bristol and Wales.
My first question to Ben Johnson, Suez’s corporate affairs manager, who is showing me round is why my waste is travelling nearly 200km from London to Bristol, as it doesn’t seem environmentally friendly.
He explains that London boroughs club together and send their rubbish to waste transfer stations in Brentford and Ruislip, West London. Then the rubbish is loaded on to freight trains to Avonmouth in one trip. ‘People tend to not want to live near plants, so you often find them in industrial areas.’
After a safety briefing and being appropriately suited and booted, we enter a recycling plant. The first thing that strikes me is the scale. The hangar-like structure is enormous with mountains of rubbish waiting to be whisked off by the conveyor belts for sorting.
More than 200 tonnes of rubbish comes through the plant every day. It whizzes along the conveyor belts with machines sorting the paper from the plastic along with the odd shoe (that’s a no-no) and lots of DVDs (also a definite no). It’s dusty, noisy and smelly. As well as state-of-the-art machinery, line workers do the jobs the machines can’t, such as identifying cardboard that is covered with plastic film.
The end goal is to produce bales of recyclable materials that are as ‘pure’ as possible contradictory, it is still a better environmental option compared to using virgin, raw materials such as oil.
But some of our recycled materials do stay in this country. For example, all the newsprint manufactured here in the UK is now made from 100% recycled paper.
It’s a 10-minute drive to my next destination. Ben and I are off to an Energy From Waste Centre. This is the future of black-bin waste, to make landfill a thing of the past, and it’s where non-recyclable waste is turned into renewable energy.
This plant can process more than 400,000 tonnes a year, producing enough electricity to power the equivalent of 50,000 homes, and it enables the
West London Waste Authority to divert an incredible 96% of residents’ waste from landfill. Councils have to pay a landfill tax, £80 for every tonne they dump – as a result businesses, such as Suez, have set up to cater for the growing need for councils to dispose of our waste through other means.
The first stop on my tour is the control room. It looks like a set from a James Bond film with rows of computers with graphs and charts, monitored by people sitting in leather swivel chairs. The room overlooks the enormous concrete pits, filled with thousands of black bags moved around by a grabber. The rubbish is lifted into a furnace where it is burnt at around 1,100°C. This has two useful end-products: the hot-flue gas which is used to create energy, and the ash collected at the bottom of the incinerator, which is used to make breeze blocks for the construction industry. Using waste as a combustion material can not only massively reduce landfill, it also eliminates the methane, which would otherwise leak from landfill sites.
So even though it sounds counter-intuitive, burning our rubbish is better for the environment. Up to 23% of our renewable energy comes from these waste facilities, and that’s equivalent to using 726,000 tonnes of oil.
The biggest surprise on my trip, though, is the amount of hazardous waste people throw away – aerosols, camping gas bottles and batteries, which can explode and burn the people working on the production lines. As Ben says, ‘As a society we have forgotten the human interaction that happens with our rubbish.
‘If everyone could see what happens to our rubbish, our habits would change instantly,’ he adds. And he is right! That night, as soon as I got home, I emptied my bin to remove my food waste and then I took the tops off the wine bottles in the recycling crate.
To find out more about recycling in your area, visit gov.uk/recycling-collections