Where does it go?

What happens to your cans, old newspaper, plastic bottle or cereal box when you put it in your recycling bin? If you’ve ever wondered how an old soup tin gets from your house to the production line at a car factory then read on…

From Kerbside Collections

Mixed recycling collected by your council is taken to the Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) at Great Blakenham in Suffolk, for separation and bailing. Mixed recyclable waste collected in Waveney District is taken to a similar facility in Norfolk.

What happens at the MRF?

Freighters deliver your recyclable materials directly to the MRF from your home and after the consignment of material is weighed it’s loaded into large bays. From here it is shovelled onto a series of conveyor belts to begin the separation process.

A line picker has the unenviable job of removing larger unwanted items of unrecyclable waste (such as plastic bags, whole wheelie bins and dead animals!) by hand from the first conveyor belt. The material then passes through a rotating drum to remove cans and plastic bottles. Further items of contaminating material (such as glass and cardboard) are removed by hand from further conveyor belts by a team of up to 20 line pickers.

Once unwanted items have been removed during the ‘manual’ stage the mixed materials are mechanically separated into different types. A high-speed conveyor belt separates lighter items such as paper from plastic containers and cans. Cans are pulled out and separated from the plastic items by magnets. Each of the separated material types are collected in different loading bays for compacting and bailed for transportation to reprocessing companies to be made into new products.

This presentation shows the how the Materials Recycling Facility operates, in greater detail.

Details of what happens to your garden (green) waste kerbside collections can be found at the Composting @ the Kerbside page.

Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) recyclable materials Some of the materials collected at the 18 HWRCs across Suffolk are taken to the MRF at Gt Blakenham. The HWRCs accept a wider range of materials, which cannot be processed at the MRF in Suffolk. These items are taken to various (mainly local) contractors to be reprocessed in the following ways:

Further details of what happens to your garden waste material collected at HWRCs can be found at the Composting @ the Household Waste Recycling Centre page.

Details of the quantities of materials that are reprocessed in the UK can be found at the RecycleNow website .