A “rubbish” post

Ever wondered what happened to your recycling once it leaves your house?  Well today I got to find out – thanks to a Uni site visit.  I tried to get a few shots but only had my iPhone with me so the quality isn’t up to its usual standards.

This recycling centre was in Grangemouth.  It was much less hi-tech than I imagined – basically all the mixed recycling went onto a conveyor belt and guys sorted it by hand into separate materials – newspaper, plastic, cans, paper etc.  It is proper manual labour and the guys doing the sorting certainly don’t have an easy job.  After that it gets bundled together and is sent away for reprocessing – a lot is shipped to China where they have developed a very good reprocessing industry.

I was surprised by how much the centre could recycle – lots of plastic, old wheelie bins and bath tubs for instance, can be processed into pellets for re-use.

One last thing that I learnt – rinse anything that has had food in it before you put it out for the recycling men to collect!

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