What Happens to Your Recycling and Waste

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• What Happens to Your Recycling and Waste

Your dry recycling is taken to the Villiers Road Household Reuse and Recycling Centre where it is loaded on to 20-tonne lorries and transported to a recycling facility in Crayford, Kent. Once sorted, the materials are sold on to manufacturers across the UK, Europe and sometimes the Far East. Viridor Waste Management sells the materials on the Council’s behalf, with the borough receiving 85% of any income generated.

Once sold, the recyclable materials are reprocessed into a variety of new products. For example:

• Paper is pulped, de-inked and turned into newsprint and cardboard
• Cans are shredded, melted and turned into new drink cans
• Plastic bottles are washed, melted and turned into plastic pipes, fleeces and new bottles
• Glass is crushed and mixed with raw materials before being melted in a furnace – the melted material is then moulded into new bottles or jars. Sometimes, the crushed glass is used as sand in the construction industry.

Your food waste will be transported in large lorries to an industrial composting facility in Sutton. Here, the food waste will be shredded, mixed with green garden waste and put into special tunnels where air circulation can be controlled and the optimum conditions for composting are created. The process is called ‘in-vessel composting’.

The material will then be transferred to a maturation pad, for the final stage of composting. The whole process takes about eight weeks. The high quality compost that is produced will be used in parks and gardens across London.

Most of the items you can recycle using your brown containers can also be composted in the garden (cooked food waste, raw fish, meat and bones are the only exceptions).

Any waste you put in your black wheelie bin will be taken to the Villiers Road Household Reuse and Recycling Centre where it is bulked up with landfill waste collected from other collection rounds across the borough.

The rubbish will then be transferred in large 24-tonne articulated lorries to a landfill site at Beddington Lane in the neighbouring London Borough of Sutton. In use since 1999, landfill site at Beddington Lane is 227 acres in size and receives approximately 365,000 tonnes of landfill waste every year.

As the biodegradable waste, such as food, cardboard and paper, rots in the landfill site, it lets of methane – a very powerful greenhouse gas.

The company that runs the site, Viridor Waste Management, go to great lengths to capture as much of the methane as possible before it is released into the air. They use it to power processors on the site and supply electricity to the National Grid.