Other
councils are more laid back and say chuck all the non-glass into the same box. Presumably
this means the residents are likely to recycle more waste and the council’s
collection and onward handling is that much simpler. But surely it creates a
big headache downstream?
 |
| UPM Shotton and the MRRF |
Not at UPM
Shotton where they have a massive recycling centre which handles the waste from
30% of UK households. Huge lorries are constantly arriving from across the UK
and as far afield as Scotland to deliver all sorts of materials including the
jumbled up boxes of ‘co-mingled’ stuff to use the recycling jargon.
I watched a
truck disgorge its load of 25 tonnes by means of a ‘walking floor trailer’.
This gets loaded onto a conveyor belt for a human check to pull out things,
such as a duvet, that might snag the machinery. Thereafter it’s all done by
machine with a bit of human quality assurance at the end. Powerful magnets and
eddy current separators extract the metals. Sensors detect the characteristics of,
for example, carrier bags and jets of air blast them on to another conveyor. And
so it goes on until bales of sorted materials are stacked up ready to load onto
trucks for factories to use again.
But not the newsprint.
Each year Shotton converts 650,000 tonnes of old newspapers into half a million
tonnes of recycled newsprint. The most modern of the three paper mills, the
largest in the world, produces paper nine metres wide at 60 mph!
I was
pleased with what I saw and all the efforts to power the plant with renewables –
even the unwanted newspaper ink gets burnt to generate power. Driving back over
the Denbigh Moors my head was buzzing with what I’d seen, the deafening noises
of machinery, the putrid smell of rotting biomass. Ahead of me the northern Snowdonia range
covered in snow and an array of wind turbines poking over the horizon like giants
practising their semaphore.
It was all
very impressive but things would be so much better if we consumed less products
and packaging and reduced our need for recycling.
that's a beautiful photo of Snowdonia covered in snow - was lucky enough to be up there in that snow yesterday. The recycling thing does annoy me - we try so hard to recycle everything yet I'm always astounded by the amount of packaging that goes into some products - and with Christmas coming there will be all the more to get rid of, good to hear how it is being done though
ReplyDeletegood article, its interesting to see the commingling v source separation debate seems to polarise so many in the recycling industry and yet shotton, in wales is showing that both ways work for them, its a good MRF too they seem to produce pretty good quality outputs and makes their entire business more diverse and more financially sustainable and ultimately leads to more recycling
ReplyDelete