The council said it is able to add the material streams as its waste disposal authority, the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), awarded two, five-year interim MRF material sorting contracts to waste management companies Greenstar UK and Bywaters in July (see letsrecycle.com story).
The NLWA awarded the deals, which run to December 2014, in a bid to widen the range of material collected and recycled in North London, with mixed plastics seen as one area of particular interest.
The NLWA handles waste disposal on behalf of Camden and six other North London boroughs.
Announcing the proposed change, councillor Chris Knight, executive member for the environment at Camden, said: “This is great news. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to recycle as much as they can. Plastic is something residents were often asking us to recycle and we are glad that from October they can.”
The council is urging residents to not place mixed plastic material in with their kerbside recycling until the service becomes operational at the start of October.
Camden currently offers residents a weekly twin-stream kerbside recycling collection which separates fibres from other dry recyclable material. At the moment, dry material is sorted at the council's waste contractor Veolia Environmental Services' Greenwich MRF, while the paper is sold directly to reprocessors.
Swindon borough council rolled-out mixed plastic collections to 80,000 households in the local authority area at the start of June (see letsrecycle.com story), however, the mixed plastic collections from the kerbside are not widespread in the UK due to issues surrounding end markets for the material.
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