Moray to collect more plastics at kerbside

The council can now collect PET 1, which covers plastic bottles and yoghurt pots, HDPE 2, which covers shampoo bottles and margarine tubs, and PP5, which covers ketchup bottles and takeaway tubs.

Household waste is collected every three weeks by the council, whereas recycling is usually collected fortnightly. During the pandemic it has been collected every three weeks. Previously residents would have put the additional plastics in with their residual waste.

The council told letsrecycle.com it was able to collect more because its contractor Wyllie Recycling has expanded the range of plastics it can process for recycling.

Moray council’s waste manager Mike Neary said: “We already know that residents in Moray are among the best at recycling in Scotland and we want to make it even easier for them to recycle more from the kerbside.”

According to data from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), Moray residents recycled 59% of their waste in 2019, up from 57.4% in 2018. This gives Moray the third highest recycling rate in Scotland.

The council still cannot accept plastics marked PVC 3, LDPE 4, PS 6, or 7. This covers items such as cling film, carrier bags, crisp packets, coffee pods, polystyrene soft foam, and plastic toys.

Recycling process

Plastics and cans collected from households in Moray are processed by Moray Reach Out, a social enterprise which provides training opportunities for vulnerable adults.

They are then collected by waste management company Wyllie Recycling for further processing at their facility in Perth. In July 2019 Wyllie Recycling sold the commercial waste branch of its company to Perth and Kinross council to focus on plastic recycling (see letsrecycle.com story).

As part of Wyllie’s recycling process for Moray’s plastics and cans, any items of general waste are identified and removed as part of quality control. Any remaining metals, like tin cans, are then removed with industrial magnets and eddy-currents to ensure the highest purity of plastics.

Clean plastics are compressed into one tonne bales of clean high-quality plastics and then separated, washed and flaked into pellets at UK re-processors to make new products like drinks bottles, fleeces, benches and toys.