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Revealed: what really goes on with your recycling rubbish behind the scenes
The chaos of Britain’s recycling system is exposed today with hundreds of thousands of tons of waste being redirected to landfill or incinerators.
Despite residents sorting their household waste into separate bins, up to half of “recyclable” material is not being recycled in some areas of England, government data shows.
Today, The Telegraph launches a Zero Waste campaign calling on the Government, local councils and private companies to do more to boost the country’s lacklustre recycling rates.
It is backed by Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, the two Tory leadership candidates, as well as Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary.
Mr Johnson said: “We all need to do much more to increase recycling rates and everything possible must be done to make it easier to recycle.”
Mr Hunt said: “We can all do more to lower the amount we waste. There is more to do to ensure recycling is easy and accessible for everyone.”
Mr Gove said that he commended The Telegraph “for raising awareness of this critical issue”.
He added: “We know that people want to recycle and do their bit to safeguard our precious environment, so I’m delighted to support the Zero Waste campaign.”
He said his department was “introducing a more consistent set of recyclable materials for collection in England, no matter which part of the country people live in”.
Campaigners said that consumers would be shocked to find out that their recycling was not being processed as they thought.
“People would understandably be appalled if the materials they have diligently gathered together for recycling actually ended up being incinerated,” said Julian Kirby from Friends of the Earth.
Across the whole of England – calculated by adding all 123 unitary and disposal authorities – nearly 10 million tons (9,980,400 exactly) of household waste were sent for recycling over one year and 467,477 tons were rejected – 5 per cent.
Councils do not have a uniform recycling policy, leading to households being faced with a bewildering array of different systems.
An investigation by The Telegraph and Greenpeace’s Unearthed can also reveal that staff at a London centre are putting plastic and paper in bins with rubbish that is sent to be burnt.
The four London councils for which the company sorts recycling all use a co-mingling system where different items are mixed together, but it is likely that news of staff putting commonly recyclable items in “general waste” bins will raise concerns.
On Wednesday night, three of the councils for whom the facility sort recycling said they were investigating the findings and one – Hammersmith and Fulham – said it already had concerns about Western Riverside Waste Authority (WRWA).
The Telegraph found that staff at a recycling centre in south London appeared to be routinely discarding plastic bottles, paper and cardboard into bins marked “general waste”.
Employees working in “pre-sort” at WRWA's materials recovery facility, which is operated by Cory Riverside Energy, are tasked with removing 35 items per minute from the conveyer belt, but some staff were seen putting unopened sacks containing recycling with the “general waste”.
Cory said that only contaminated recycling was discarded by the firm.
WRWA and Cory said that the facility in south London recycles 99 per cent of the recyclable material it receives and there were “legitimate reasons why it might appear to the untrained eye that a worker has put a bag of recyclables into a bin... The worker may have recognised contaminants within the bag or even black bin liners”.
Cory said that workers were told what to put in the bin and “collected recyclate is not sent to incineration unless it is contaminated”.
investigations@telegraph.co.uk