Recycling facilities for the bottles were introduced in February 2002, since when some 834,000 bottles, equivalent to 30 tonnes, have been collected. A second lorry carrying the remaining 12 tonnes of bottles will be leaving the area shortly.
The bottles are sent to Plastics Recovery of Preston, which grades and bales them and exports them for recycling in the Far East.
The council set up collection bins at seven locations across its large rural area in north east Scotland. Alison McInnes, chair of the infrastructure services committee, said: “The bottles will be reprocessed into products such as fleeces, boxes, composters, watering cans and filling material for jackets. Diverting hundreds of thousands of bottles from landfill is great news.”
Aberdeenshire was recognised in 2001 by Audit Scotland as the most improved council for recycling. Its recycling rate rose from 6% to 16.4%, while the average across Scotland was only 6.4 per cent. In 2002, Aberdeenshire reported a recycling rate of 21%.
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