Delving in the Rubbish

There’s something about the word ‘recycling’ that can make people glaze over.  Not because they don’t do their best to get the right stuff in the right bins or favour a ‘no plastic’ option if at all possible in the vegetable shop.  No, it’s just that the word carries with it an air or worthiness that smacks of those weak ‘knitting your own lentils’ jokes.

Well, let me say that I went on a trip around my local recycling plant and I found it jolly exciting.

My particular interest stems from a TV programme I once saw.  The boss of Viridor, the huge recycling contractor, went incognito amongst the workers to see what the job was really like.  It was so gripping, watching these streams of rubbish heading along conveyers and workers grabbing items.  Most of it was done automatically but they didn’t show much of that as their focus was the human story.  Well, it wasn’t mine.  I just kept thinking  ‘How the hell?’ and ‘Where does that go?’ and ‘How do they get the curry off the foil dishes?’   So, when I saw an announcement on Twitter that my local depot was having an Open Day I signed up immediately.

Upon our arrival we were made welcome, guided into the Education Dept and given a talk by a nice lady called Alison.  She explained the overall strategy for Greater Manchester and showed pictures of all the different coloured bins they used in different areas.  I could have done without some of this to be honest but there were kids there as well as people from Bolton and Salford where they do vary the bin colour so it had to be quite wide-ranging.  

Admittedly my heart sank a bit when I found out we had to do an activity, like in those in-house training courses we used to have at work.   However, it turned out I didn’t know as much as I thought about what to put in each bin so that was an eye opener.

Then she started to explain the really good stuff about how they sort it all out.  The paper bin contents go off to make more paper.  The garden and grub stuff goes to giant composters.  The unrecyclable things in the black bins go to either incinerators or anaerobic digestion, both creating a new source of energy.  The process that we were to see in action was the sorting of all the contents of the brown bins, which I refer to as ‘bottle’ bins. 

Before I go any further I do need to say that the Health and Safety rules were extremely strict and we had to wear a high-viz jacket, hard hat, goggles, gloves and ear defenders which had speakers in them, enabling us to hear the voice of the lady guiding us round.  Now things that affect your ears can do funny things to you and I began feeling a bit nauseous and disorientated, particularly as I had goggles over my glasses.  Working a camera with gloves on isn’t that easy either so my description may not be as effective as it should be.  Everyone else seemed pretty perky though so, strengthened by the general enthusiasm, I soldiered on.

The waste entering this massive maze of conveyor belts should consist of glass bottles, foil, aluminium cans, plastic bottles, metal cans and aerosols.  There are a couple of operatives placed to grab anything they spot that’s really unsuitable but, in the main, everything heads for the mechanical separation.  It’s amazing how they do it.  Upsteps and downsteps we went, following the stream of rejected household containers.

The first test the rubbish encounters is ‘The Magnet’.  This lifts out all the steel cans and foil but not the aluminium.  That has to be given some sort of slight electrification, like static. Then it can be lifted out by the next magnet and sent down to be squashed into blocks.

Now it’s time to attack the glass.  Hammers shatter every bottle and all the glass is broken into tinier pieces and sifted out through a sort of sieve.

On the rubbish travels, this time on an upwards stepped conveyor belt which could work as a salmon leap in another world.  Here it is subjected to ‘The Beam’.  If light travels through a plastic bottle, in a millisecond, a blast of air jets that bottle away from the line.  These desirable transparent bottles,  easily used for recycling, then have a final identity check by actual people before being punctured, flattened and sent to be made into new plastic objects.

The less useful items, the coloured opaque bottles, can still be recycled but are made into granules and used for lower grade things such as packaging or more opaque bottles.

If Alison were to read this I’m sure she could correct me on many things. However, the visit has made me see how worthwhile it is for us to make that little extra effort to manage our rubbish.  A few last words of advice – always remove bottle tops before recycling, don't put yoghurt pots in the brown bin and persuade your cat to eat food from tins, not pouches.