Andy Doran, the LARAC chair, was responding to comments from junior trade minister Nigel Griffiths, who told Parliament that he was “alarmed” at the trend towards councils mixing paper for recycling with metals, glass or other materials that contaminate the paper” and that he would press for this trend to be “reversed”
(see letsrecycle.com story).
”If the material is not of a suitable quality, the mills would not take it.“
– Andy Doran, LARAC
The minister said co-mingling paper with other materials “makes it much more difficult to recover quality paper products”.
But responding to the comments, Mr Doran said local authorities could not innovate in order to meet their recycling targets if the government was prescriptive about collections. And, the LARAC Chair slammed the DTI minister's claims that co-mingling produced poor quality collected paper.
The LARAC chair said: “To say that a reduction in quality is inevitable because there has been a reduction in source separated paper collections is just not true. If the material is not of a suitable quality, the mills would not take it, and that is no good to our members' schemes.
“In fact, the amount of recycling tonnage has increased, so all these kerbside schemes must be working, regardless of whether paper is source separated or not,” he added.
Freedoms
Current government thinking is to give local authorities greater freedoms, LARAC said, so any move to specify how councils should run their recycling services would be contradictory.
LARAC, which represents over 380 members from local authorities across the UK, said a WRAP report had shown that it is the management of a paper recycling scheme and not the type of system used for a scheme that determined the quality of paper collected.
“Interestingly, management of collection methods proved to be a much more significant factor than the collection method used, and all methods were found to be able to deliver paper of an acceptable quality,” LARAC said.
Quoting the WRAP report, LARAC said the “widespread perception of poor quality material arising from kerbside collection systems is a fallacy”.
Register for free to comment