The way municipal waste is collected and recycled has changed dramatically over the last five years and an increasing amount of waste is being sent to materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to be treated and sorted before being recycled.
This process is rarely carried out in the same area, county or region that the waste was created in and we need to develop a more effective way of monitoring the movement of wastes and assessing compliance.
An increasing amount of this waste includes poor quality or badly sorted materials. For example; paper may be contaminated with food wastes, glass or plastic. As a result, these materials are difficult to process and the outputs may not be suitable for reprocessing. Low value, poorly sorted waste streams are more at risk of being sent to landfill or illegally exported.
We are changing the way we audit permitted MRF facilities and have developed a ‘waste stream approach’ which involves improving the existing auditing process to find out more information on:
- the quality and quantity of input and outputs at MRFs
- where different waste streams go
- what happens to waste streams when they get to their destination such as treatment and processing.
This approach is part of both our Corporate and Waste & Resource Management Strategies and will help us ensure that businesses and other organisations are resource efficient, minimise pollution and manage their waste responsibly.
We carried out successful trials of the waste stream approach in our North West region and are currently conducting more detailed trials in Wales and our Thames and South West regions. The trials will continue to run for the next few months to ensure that both the audit and information sharing methodologies are practical for our staff to use. Once these trials are complete we will implement the approach nationally.
To find out more please contact: 0370 8506506 or visit our website.
