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| NORTH YORKSHIRE |  | | | CLEVELAND | | | COUNTY DURHAM | | |
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Life after the wheelie bin – what goes where and why
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| THE EMPTIES: a lorry full of plastic bottles is unloaded for recycling |
RUBBISH certainly gets
around. Newspaper is recycled
in North Wales.
Cans go to Teesside, or
Warrington. Cardboard - the globetrotter
- is shipped to China.
Glass is less exotic: it is recycled in
Barnsley. Still, it beats a lifetime in
landfill.
This rubbish story begins on a
crisp, sunny morning in Catterick
Village, near Richmond. It's Friday
morning and a line of blue bags,
for newspaper, and green boxes,
for cans and glass, stand by the village
green. The bin men appear,
scoop up the bags and boxes and
MONEY-SAVING: John Miller of Yorwaste on a mountain of waste
paper which can be recycled - D&S
empty them into the wagon. Here
comes the story of the week - a
bottle of wine and two cans of
Winalot, four bottles of Carlsberg
and a jar of Homepride sauce.
The lads work quickly, and
smoothly. It isn't always this easy.
"Sometimes people don't wash the
cans out," says bin man Jonathan
Cook. "You'll get a cat food tin
with a bit left in and maggots
crawling all over. We don't expect
things to be gleaming, but that
wasn't nice."
His colleague, Mark Carson, chips
in while dumping Daily Mails.
"On a morning like this, it's a lovely
job. You see the general public,
have a laugh."
Richmondshire is 500 square
miles, and stretches from the edge
of Darlington to the edge of Cumbria.
Messrs Cook and Carson, like
all the district's bin men, take their
rubbish to a transfer station near
Scorton, three miles from Catterick
Village. When we arrive, the
smell hits you.
In a big, open barn, a yellow digger,
with a mattress in its claws,
pushes the rubbish into a large
pile. Nearby lies an old tin bath.
Was that left in a wheelie bin?
"People will throw away anything
they can get into a wheelie bin,"
says John Miller, external affairs
manager for Yorwaste, the company
that runs the site. "We had a
car engine recently."
The engines and tin baths, if not
sold for scrap, are taken to landfill,
along with other rubbish that isn't
recycled. Richmondshire's own
landfill site, at Brompton on
Swale, filled up three years ago.
Now, it goes by truck to Teesside.
Beside the tin bath, and the landfill
pile, is a mountain of newspapers
big enough to climb. They are
set for North Wales, to be made
into newsprint again.
"Just think of the landfill space
they would take up," says Mr
Miller, wistfully.
Next to the newspapers are cans -
aluminium to Warrington, ferrous
to Teesside. The pile of glass is for
Barnsley, and the plastic bottles go
to Rochdale.
Hearing all this, landfill seemed
primitive. Compared to crosscountry
recycling, throwing stuff
in a big hole is backward. It's like
hiding dirty plates in a cupboard,
instead of washing them: the
problem is out of sight, but not
solved. And, of course, the cupboard
will eventually fill up. And
smell.
But recycling isn't just worthy - it
makes money, and saves money.
Yorwaste is a company owned by
North Yorkshire County Council
and the City of York Council. It
pays Richmondshire District
Council for its recyclable waste
and then sells it to reprocessing
plants. In return, Richmondshire
District Council pays Yorwaste to
bury its landfill.
Last year, Richmondshire recycled
32 per cent of its waste. The majority,
68 per cent, is sent to the
big hole. That's why taxpayers still
pay for bin men.
Mr Miller estimates that 75-80 per
cent of Yorwaste's waste is
processed in this country. But
cardboard, for example, is sent to
China.
Mr Miller says: "China is the
biggest market on earth. Everything
is made over there and so
they need the packaging. We prefer
to keep things in the UK, but it
depends on the market."
Local authorities don't just make
money when they recycle: they
save it too. The Government's
landfill tax is £24 a tonne - set to
increase by £8 a tonne until 2011
at least. Richmondshire collects
21,000 tonnes of waste a year - if it
all went to landfill, it would cost
£504,000 in tax.
Across North Yorkshire, 400,000
tonnes are collected each year: if it
went to landfill, the council would
chuck away £9.6m. But in Richmondshire,
it's not that simple: the
council does not want everything
recycled.
"Our current top target is 42 per
cent," says Sean Little, the council's
head of waste. "With current
services, any extra would increase
our carbon footprint, due to extra
vans on the road and so on. There
is a notional 40 per cent threshold
- when you start going over that,
you could do more harm than
good, particularly in rural areas
like ours."
Richmondshire's vast size means
half the district has, for now, been
spared fortnightly collections -
or, as the council calls them, "alternate
weekly collections".
Whatever the name, they're not
popular. In May, a Brompton on
Swale company, Bin and Gone,
made national news when it
started collecting rubbish in the
weeks the council did not.
"No-one is saying alternate
weekly is popular," Mr Little says.
"But at the end of the day, it's a
necessary evil. Introducing it
here has been a lot easier than
we thought. Total complaints
come to less than 0.1 per cent of
the 12,000 properties that have
the service.
"It has been phenomenally successful
- even we were gobsmacked
at how quickly it settled
in. Recycling increased by ten to
15 per cent when alternate weekly
came in. People had the recycling
service before, but weren't
using it. Now they have to."
So, for a while yet, cardboard will
head for China, and glass will go
to Barnsley.
At the waste transfer station, Mr
Miller stands by a mound of rich,
dark compost - recycled garden
waste - and watches a lorry load
of old papers return to whence
they came.
"Fortnightly collections," he
starts, before correcting himself.
"Sorry - alternate weekly collections
- have been revolutionary.
People don't want their rubbish
piling up for two weeks, so they
start recycling. It's simple, really."
1:14pm Friday 18th January 2008
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