The study found that over 120,000 tonnes of rigid and hard plastics are disposed of at HWRCs in the UK annually, almost 3kg per household, but that little of this is recycled.
Recoup says that handling and disposing of this volume amounts to as much as £13 million in council and waste management company costs “paying taxes and gate fees for disposal of this material”.
Opportunity
Tom McBeth, policy & infrastructure projects manager, commented: “HWRCs offer an opportunity to capture more previously unrecycled material as recycling targets continue to grow. This, combined with increased demand for recycling and recyclate through various policies and legislation, means that there is a need for more materials to be captured and recycled, particularly domestically.”
Circular
As part of the report, RECOUP has developed a number of recommendations and interventions that would help enable plastic disposed of at HWRCs to fit into circular economy models, as well as potential steps to build on this research further.
These recommendations include:
- Creating a robust dataset relating to material captured at HWRCs.
- Better understanding the journey of this material from collection to its final destination.
- Identifying the requirements for greater investment in UK infrastructure to sort and reprocess traditionally ‘hard to recycle’ plastics.
- Develop re-use infrastructure to remove items being disposed of as waste in instances where they can be recovered.
Further information
The report, ‘Plastics Management and Recycling at Household Waste Recycling Centres in the UK’, is available from Recoup.
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