Tuesday 8:00am Chilcompton, Somerset: Tina Curtis, 40, puts out her family's rubbish and recycling ready for collection by Mendip District Council. A small brown bin is full to the brim with the family's food waste, which will be turned into high-grade potting compost. A black plastic box contains the family's waste paper, bottles, tins and other recyclables. She dumps a surprisingly small bag of rubbish into her wheelie bin.
 
Tina's local council manages to recycle over half of the ‘waste' it receives, compared to the national average of around 25 percent. Tina wants to recycle everything and is frustrated by even Mendip District Council's above average result. "I wish they'd recycle plastic." she barks at the man from the council. "It's such a waste."

She has a point. Every year we throw away 17.5 billion plastic bags, 290 for every person in the UK.

9:30am: Husband and wife team Martin and Lynn Vinten arrive in a big green truck to collect Tina's recycling. They've been working since dawn.

"People think it's weird working with your husband but we get on well," smiles Lynn.

Martin, an ex-bus driver, is in the cab whilst Lynn, a former conference organiser at Bath University, scurries from house to house gathering up recycling bins. She separates out the different types of recycling on the hoof and dumps them in large steel boxes on the back of the truck.

"I love this job," she says. "I love all the fresh air and being able to help the environment."
 
2:00pm Evercreetch Depot near Castle Cary, Somerset. Martin and Lynn arrive at the depot after calling at 600 houses across the Mendip hills. Their truck bulges with two tonnes of recycling, including Tina's. The couple head off for a well earned cup of tea while their lorry is unloaded.

Our crew's steel boxes of paper, cans and bottles are emptied into separate 10 feet high piles ready for "bulking up", or compressing. This is done by driving JCBs and forklifts back and forth over the recycling to squash it flat.

"It's primitive but it's the simplest and cheapest way of doing it," says Simon Porter, general manager of ECT, the company that runs the site.

2:15 pm: The kitchen scraps are tipped into smelly 40 foot long vats ready for composting. Shoes and clothes are taken to an old shipping container. Once a week these are sent to a warehouse in Birmingham where they are sorted and graded. The good clothes are given away to charity shops or shipped to the third world. Most are sold abroad where they are shredded and the fibres turned into felt and padding for car seats. The shorter fibres are used in house insulation, mops and padded envelopes.

"Rags from Britain end up being recycled everywhere from Togo to Slovenia," says Professor Adam Read, who works for the waste firm Hyder Consulting. "Textiles are now the biggest internationally traded recyclable commodity." 
 
2:50pm: A truck arrives to collect a skip of Yellow Pages. These are taken to Excel Fibres in Rhymney, South Wales, where they are mashed up and their fibres extracted and used to strengthen the asphalt on roads and airport runways all over the world.

"You can halve the thickness of tarmac you need on a road by using the fibres from a Yellow Pages," says Simon Porter. The recycled telephone books are also used in animal bedding, house insulation, glues and paints.

3:27pm: As Tina prepares to pick up her 12-year-old daughter from School, a tanker arrives at the Evercreetch depot to collect her old engine oil. This is ferried to Chemical Recoveries of Avonmouth, near Bristol, where it's refined ready for use as heavy fuel oil. Before long it will be hard at work powering cargo ships across the Atlantic and melting tarmac ready for use by road building gangs.

4:52pm Harlow: By mid-afternoon, Tina's glass bottles arrive in Harlow, Essex. Some are ground up into sharp sand and used to make bricks, tiles, cement and concrete. After further processing the ground glass can be used to replace the sand in golf bunkers and water filters.

Coloured glass is often shipped abroard, mostly to France and Germany, where it's melted down and turned back into beer and wine bottles. These soon arrive back in the UK filled with fine German beers and vintage French wines. But this isn't just a one way trade. Britain can hardly get enough high quality clear glass for recycling, which is needed to make bottles for our hugely important whiskey and gin industries.

"We drink out of coloured bottles but export in clear glass ones," says Professor Adam Read. "So there's a thriving international trade in glass with Britain as a major player."

Wednesday 9:30 am, Evercreetch Depot: Neil Fowler arrives with his truck to pick up a ten tonne vat of fermenting kitchen scraps. He drives it to the Dimmer waste site, four miles down the road. Once there, Tina's kitchen waste along with that from thousands of other families' is shredded into a runny mush. This slurry is then dumped into a massive 50 foot long vat and left to stew. When I peek into one of the vats I'm shocked by the smell - or lack of it. It smells little different to a normal garden compost heap.
 
Once thoroughly rotted, the compost is sifted, graded and eventually sold for £2.50 a bag. One local commercial grower uses the compost in his greenhouses to produce red peppers for Somerset's network of farmers' markets. The Dimmer site produces 16,000 tonnes of compost a year from 24,000 tonnes of kitchen scraps.

9:45am: Wyvern Waste landfill site, Dimmer, Somerset. Brian Foulsham, a site manager at Dimmer, checks the main public recycling point. This is where people bring the stuff not collected by the council, such as TVs, Calor gas bottles and garden furniture. Brian's personal favourites are the spectacles and sunglasses, which he sends to the Third World after they've been sorted and graded. There's also sizeable piles of TVs, mobile phones and computers.

"We once found a hand-grenade in the recycling," says Brian. "So we need to check the recycling bins carefully. Fortunately the grenade was a dummy. We've also found a mortar round and an aircraft ejector seat.

"We never did find the pilot," he grins.

9:55 am Dimmer: A cavernous truck arrives from Liverpool to pick up several tonnes of fridges, old TVs, computers and mobile phones. To me it all looks like junk but it's apparently packed with valuable metals such as lead, copper and even gold. Nationally we throw away over 100 million electronic gadgets and appliances like cookers and fridges each year, much of which ends up in landfills. All of this hardware weighs in at 936,000 tonnes, the same as 2,400 jumbo jets.

When the truck from Dimmer arrives at the M. Baker complex in Liverpool, the electronics and appliances are carefully sorted - before being smashed to pieces and ground up with massive hammers. The resulting tiny flaky granules are then spun inside a giant rotating cylinder, which works much like a Dyson vacuum cleaner. This ‘cyclone' separates out all of the shattered components so the valuable metals and other elements can be extracted from the granules. The metals are sent off to specialist recyclers around the country whilst the plastics are shipped to Lincolnshire to be turned into packaging. Even the gases from the old fridges and their foam insulation are recovered and re-used.

In the near future, Britain is expected to start shipping a significant proportion of its electronic waste to India and China where it will be sold on to local repairers and recyclers. Both countries have enough cheap and skilled labour to make it economic to repair even the cheapest hardware, such as old mobile phones and defunct DVD players. The stuff that's beyond repair will be recycled, turned into new gadgets and, no doubt, eventually sold back to us.
 
9:55am: Chris Jonas, general manager of the Dimmer Site, checks the gas pressure on a giant pump near his office. All of the rotting rubbish dumped at the Dimmer landfill site produces vast amounts of natural gas each year, which is recovered and burned to produce electricity. Together with the gas from two other local landfills, Chris's site produces enough electricity to power all of Somerset's street lighting. 
 
10:10am: Chris continues his morning rounds with a visit to a nature reserve in a corner of the 100 acre site. This man-made reserve cleans up the toxic waste-water from the landfill. These toxic waters are fed to vats of hungry bacteria, which gobble up all the poisons and converts them into harmless water and carbon dioxide. After a couple of weeks the vats are emptied into a reedbed the spitting image of those found across the Somerset Levels. The reeds slowly filter away the remaining heavy metals and poisons. The clean water then trickles into the river Cary and onto the Bristol Channel.

10:48am Aylesford, Kent: While Tina's kitchen scraps were being shredded for compost, her waste paper was on the road heading towards Kent, ready for recycling into newsprint. Her avidly read copies of the Daily Mail are first bleached to remove the ink before being pulped into a slurry. This is fed into a massive paper-making machine over 100 yards long. One of the mills, the monster ‘Paper Machine 14', produces enough newsprint each day to stretch from Aylesford to Athens and spits it out at over 60 miles per hour.

Low quality paper is generally shipped abroad, mostly to China and India. Once there, it's turned into boxes and used as packaging for the cheap manufactured goods they sell to us. Britain now exports roughly half of its paper for recycling, which amounts to 3.3 million tonnes annually, a 400-fold increase since 1999.

Plastic bags and bottles are also exported in vast quantities to China and India. Last year Britain exported 175,000 tonnes of plastic, almost 60 percent of the total we dump in our recycling bins. Once recycled, it finds its way into computers, fridges, and TVs as well as all of the packaging they come wrapped up in.

"They're desperate for our waste which they see as useful raw materials." says Professor Read. "So they're quite happy to buy our old plastic bottles and ‘waste' paper and recycle them."

11:15 am: A huge articulated lorry arrives at the Evercreetch Depot to pick up Tina's squashed aluminium and steel cans. Some will wind their way to China and India where they'll be recycled and used in cheap electronic goods, but most are shipped 120 miles to the AMG detinning plant at Llanelli, South Wales. Here they are shredded by massive rotating blades to produce tiny granules barely a millimetre across.

The steel granules are separated from the aluminium ones using magnets, and then dunked into caustic soda to strip away their tin coating. The tin is then extracted from this chemical soup and turned into ingots worth £3,000 a tonne. "The chances are it will be back inside a tin of beans within six weeks," says a spokesman for AMG.

2:17pm Llanelli, South Wales: As the tin coating is being stripped away from the steel, the aluminium granules head off for smelting and purifying. Within a few days, Tina's empty cans of cider will become ingots of virtually pure metal worth around £1000 a tonne. And before long some of it may even end up back as a drinks can at the Tesco where works as a shop assistant.
 
2:39pm Port Talbot, South Wales: The steel from Tina's cans is compressed into 12 inch square cubes and shipped to the Corus steel works at Port Talbot and Scunthorpe. Here it's melted with molten iron at 1700 degrees centigrade before being rolled into massive steel plates. Tina's steel stands a fighting chance of ending up as a plate used to build a windmill in the North Sea, a major use for high-quality recycled steel.

So, from its starting point in Somerset, Tina's waste has been shipped around the world, recycled, and turned back into glass bottles, paper and packaging. And if she's very lucky, one of her waste cans will have ended up as part of a windmill supplying the nation with clean electricity for decades to come.

So Where does the rest of the stuff go?

France: Imports our green and brown glass.

Germany: Imports our green and brown glass.

Some cans imported too

UK: we import clear glass from across Europe.

Slovenia: imports our waste rags.

Togo: imports our waste rags.

India: imports our paper, plastic and electricals. Trade expected to explode over coming years

China: imports our paper, plastic and electricals. Trade expected to explode over coming years.

Indonesia: imports lots of our waste paper.

Comments (0) >>

Show/Hide comments

Write comment

Show/Hide comment form

Name

Comment

Write the displayed characters

Add Comment