Its been a busy week with the recent publication of the “UK Household Collection Survey” and also much in the press from various government ministers’ announcements, together of course with the publication of WRAP’s annual report.
The headline has been that we are definitely making progress in the UK with recycling and each year shows improvements in recycling rates from both industry and domestic collections. The old expression of, “where there’s muck there’s brass” has also transferred into recycling of plastics since prices of waste plastics has steadily risen during the year which must have helped producers and councils to realise that its worth spending more effort to collect and sort waste materials – since they have value!
On that theme of value, it’s been interesting to note in the UK household collection survey that over 76% of HDPE milk bottles consumed and collected in the UK during 2010 were recycled, a 5% jump from the last survey in 2008. This is probably a combination of a number of factors including:
- a continued rise in the growth of kerbside collections
- a material that is relatively easy to sort post collection (in MRFs)
- value.
HDPE milk bottles are proving to be extremely valuable since they are a good, clean source of high quality HDPE which can be widely (re)used in vast number of secondary applications.
HDPE milk bottles
So why then do we export so much of our waste materials -since effectively we’re exporting the value to other countries? Yes, its easy to do and clearly waste collection companies are able to move large quantities of partially sorted waste materials into export, but as has been repeatedly reported this week, we need to use as much as possible of this material within the UK itself. This requires, continued improvements in collection, a desire to add value by separating the waste in value streams and a local demand to drive developments and investment in green jobs.
We’re gradually moving from seeing waste materials as a problem to be resolved quickly to a resource that can be used locally. Have a look through the Centriforce website to look at real recycling in action and see what can be done with waste plastics materials.
