National Recycle Week – Where does it all go?
Recycle Week begins on the 20th June and runs until the 26th June 2011. The theme this year is “Recycling – home and away” [1] and recyclenow hope that it will encourage people to not only recycle for their kerbside collections but think about their rubbish when they are out and about and what happens to it.
They promote four key benefits to recycling:
- Recycling conserves resources – by reducing the consumption of new materials from the Earth.
- Recycling saves energy – using recycled materials in the production process consumes significantly less energy than producing products from new materials.
- Recycling protects the environment – recycling reduces the need for extraction, refining and processing of materials which create harmful air and water pollution. The UK is estimated to be saving more than 18 million tonnes of CO2 a year by recycling, the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road.
- Recycling reduces landfill – there are over 1500 landfill sites in the UK, however recycling reduces the volumes of waste sent to them [2].
But we knew that already, right? So what happens to the recycling once we put it out?
There are varying levels of kerbside collections. There are those where recyclables are sorted into their respective materials on the lorry at the kerbside, or co-mingled collections where all of your recyclables are put into one compartment on the lorry. In general, if your recyclables are collected in a generic recycling bag/box then they will be put in one compartment, whereas if you have to separate them yourself then they will be separated in the lorry. The lorry then takes them to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) to be sorted further [3].
At the MRF, the recycling is sorted and separated into type by hand or machine, or sometimes a bit of both. These materials are then sent to manufacturers who make them into new products. Millions of tonnes of material is recycled each year in the UK, for example:
- All newsprint manufactured in the UK is made from 100% recycled paper.
- All of the organic (garden and kitchen) waste collected in the UK is recycled here and usually quite close to where it was collected.
- Over 80% of the glass collected for recycling is used in the UK to make glass bottles and jars.
Recyclables such as waste plastic fetch high prices from countries such as China where there are few virgin materials readily available, such as forests or oil supplies. These are often manufactured into products that are shipped to the UK in cargo ships, where the process beings again. So as you can see, recycling your household waste contributes to a worldwide system of recycling and resource saving.
[1] http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle_week/index.html
[2] http://www.recyclenow.com/why_recycling_matters/why_it_matters/index.html
[3] http://www.recyclenow.com/why_recycling_matters/why_it_matters/what_happens_to_our.html
