Collect, sort, throw away: Mal Williams, chief executive of Cylch

Author Information: Mal Williams is the CEO of Cylch – Wales Community Recycling Network. He wrote Cleanstream- Total Resource Recovery Systems for Wales in 1998-1999 as a basis for the Community Recycling Sector's strategy in Wales. He is passionate about the social economy's role in community economic regeneration around re-use and recycling.

With much higher recycling targets on the horizon for Local Authorities across the UK, it has been revealed that the MRF-based systems of recycling co-mingled waste used by many Local Authorities in Scotland are actually sending waste to landfill rather than to reprocessors.

 This has the potential to sabotage any efforts to meet the recycling targets essential for cutting the carbon footprint of the nation.

A recent independent report by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has painted a shocking picture of the inefficiency of MRF-based systems. The process of sending mixed waste to MRFs for sorting has been shown to be 44 times as wasteful as the system employing kerbside sorting.

For example: 95, 313 tonnes of co-mingled household waste was collected from the kerbside to be sent to MRFs, of which 23, 120 tonnes – 24% – was sent to landfill. However, out of the 129, 805 tonnes of separated household waste collected, a mere 709 tonnes – 0.55% – was disposed of (Table C1, ‘Kerbside collections'). This suggests that MRF-based systems are a staggering 44 times more wasteful than source-separated systems.  

The flipside of this is that overall, more than 99% of kerbside-sorted household waste was successfully recycled. For co-mingled materials sent to a MRF, this figure stands at just 76%.

Astoundingly, the amount of co-mingled waste disposed of is even higher for that collected from bring sites – an astonishing 28,003 tonnes out of 49,422 tonnes collected. This means that 56% of co-mingled waste sent to MRFs from bring sites ended up in landfill.

It is surely ridiculous to imagine that a system that creates yet more waste should be part of the future of waste management. The suitability of MRF-based systems for the task clearly needs some serious thought.