Exeter’s Commitment to Recycling: Quality and Transparency

Do you follow our recycling account online? Denis the Dustcart has been informing people in his own unique way for a few years now and people love him for it. Here's a piece he recently posted which you may find interesting.

Follow Denis on Facebook: www.facebook.com/DustcartDenis

It does annoy me when environmental groups push the narrative that recycling is just dumped overseas. While it's true that we cannot hope to save the planet by recycling alone, it's harmful to suggest that everyone is being hoodwinked into believing their waste is being recycled rather than dumped.

It's a narrative designed to shock. I get it, sure. People need shocking into the reality of the climate crisis, and recycling is just about the least we can each do to reduce our impact on the planet while being the most many are willing to do - and there have been some shocking stories in the press about the end destinations of plastic in the hands of unscrupulous brokers.

But the shocking truth can't be pieced together from misleading pictures. I guess it’s often difficult to know the truth in today's world, but any suggestion that all recycling is handled irresponsibly is patently false.

Eroding trust in the process undermines the importance of quality recycling, and the efforts we and colleagues in the industry across the country put in to creating and pursuing solutions to the problems posed by the production of so much waste. Moreover, it directs the blame for the difficulties posed by packaging towards councils and their partners rather than those that manufacture the stuff that becomes waste.

So, what does happen to your recycling once it’s collected from your bin? Here in Exeter we take this very seriously. It’s our legal and moral obligation to know exactly what happens to the recycling we sell and this, to us, means going beyond our commitment to selling only to reputable buyers and through reputable brokers.

It means being clear and resolute in our efforts to improve our services to you while actively pursuing only the most sustainable solutions for your recycling.

This means the material we sell on must be of the best possible quality with the potential to be turned into genuinely valuable products.

We separate plastics into different streams and, wherever possible, into different polymers. In our Materials Reclamation Facility we produce separate bales of milk bottles, clear bottles, coloured bottles, pots/tubs/trays and bags – as well as fishing nets and marine crates and other rigid plastics brought in to us from our partners for sorting. Oh, and we use our granulator to shred black plastic and other problem plastics like coat hangers, ready for sale to manufacturers.

In fact, we sort our plastic well enough that our clear plastic bottles can become clear plastic bottles and trays and our milk bottles can become milk bottles again. Our shopping bags become plastic sacks for Exeter’s street bins. None of what we sort for recycling from your green bin leaves these the UK.

The majority of UK plastic found in dumping sites in far-flung places has been from mixed plastic loads that carried no value beyond government recycling subsidies accumulated through brokers as the ‘recycling’ crossed national borders. Exeter’s recycling, however, actually attracts bids from the industry. We are renowned for producing a premium product and it simply wouldn’t make sense under any circumstances for companies to pay us a premium price so that they can dump it overseas. They will only pay extra where there is better money to be made from the product, and that can only come from turning it into quality packaging.

Ultimately, the better recycling is sorted, the more potential there is for it to be turned into useful (and therefore valuable) products again.

If we can’t get something recycled, we will take it to Exeter’s Waste to Energy plant. We don’t want it travelling farther than it needs to.

In the past, limited routes to onwards markets led us to taking a flexible approach to telling people what to do with some plastics. For a while we promoted the message, ‘If it’s plastic packaging, put it in your green bin’, because we didn’t want to miss out on any valuable plastic in the confusion caused by generic packaging labelling.

We wanted to make things simple for Exeter residents, and being able to hand-sort plastic in our Materials Reclamation Facility allowed us to sort the wheat from the chaff – the bottles and trays from the crinkly salad bags, crisp packets, pet food pouches and other such things that require the kinds of specialist processes we can’t feed in to.

Now that supermarkets are collecting these harder-to-recycle cheap films, we are more active in saying what we don’t want you to put in your green bin. This has allowed us more time to focus on things we can actually find solutions for – like black plastics and higher quality films (bread bags, toilet roll wrap, etc.).

We believe in maximising our potential to have a positive impact on the environment and by taking key steps have created solutions for many plastics that no other local authority has achieved so far, but we know that transparency is the key to trust.

Ultimately there are things that simply can’t be recycled through standard local authority collections. We aren’t interested in greenwashing our services, and that’s partly why we established this Facebook page.

Will recycling save the world? No, not on its own. There is so much more we can each do.

Is recycling worth it? Absolutely. It helps us develop the habit of thinking about our impact. Gravity is, after all, the weakest force in the universe, and yet it shapes galaxies.