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.
