Yesterday's Recycling and Waste Forum 2007 event in Birmingham saw Jessica Baker of Chase Plastics warning that the wrong types of plastic are contaminating mixed recycables such that they must, in many cases, be exported for reprocessing.
Ms Baker said: “There is a danger that too much plastic is collected in a dry recyclables bin – food trays, they contaminate streams and make it almost impossible to recycle it in the UK. We need a grown-up debate to say some plastics we cannot recycle.”
LGA
Cllr Paul Bettison, who chairs the Local Government Association's environment board, agreed that more needs to be done to explain why some councils can collect plastics and some cannot – and why most councils cannot collect plastics other than plastic bottles for recycling.
Cllr Bettison, who is also leader of Bracknell council in Berkshire, said: “A number of authorities have acknowledge the fact that our public are not yet ready to identify which polymer each plastic is. We have no attractive commercial way of dealing with some polymers. In Bracknell we take only bottles, but residents are often asking why we cannot take yoghurt pots, food trays, margerine tubs.
“There is a huge yearning for knowledge on this – it's even become a dinner party conversation piece. If you tell people why, they will do an awful lot more,” he said.
At a later workshop within the Forum yesterday, John Simmons, chief executive of national plastic recycling organisation Recoup, said strong markets now exist for plastic bottles in both the domestic reprocessing sector and exports. He said the challenges to increasing plastic recycling rates was in improving collection and sorting best practice as well as increasing the awareness among householders concerning which plastics they should recycle.
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