It said the national recycling campaign being run by the Waste and Resources Action Programme this week was wasting “a real opportunity” by not communicating the need for householders to keep their recycled materials clean.
– Paul Dumpleton, Shanks
Shanks director of materials management Paul Dumpleton said: “Paperchain is absolutely right, WRAP have an obligation to promote sustainable recycling, but it appears that they will again fail to deliver the right message.”
PaperChain had revealed on Friday that it had withdrawn support from Recycle Now Week over the issue (see letsrecycle.com story).
He said of government-funded WRAP that “they really need to understand more about the effect they can have in the market in which they are trying to operate”.
The Shanks director said of the current Recycle Now campaign: “The sad thing is that we went through this last Christmas, when WRAP promoted recycling for the sake of recycling without being specific on quality. The result of which was thousands of tonnes of Christmas paper, contaminated plastics and various other things that could not be recycled.”
Mr Dumpleton, whose company collects household waste for recycling around the UK, said householders needed a “clear and concise” message on the need to wash out food containers, avoid putting cans and bottles inside other packaging and keep non-recyclable materials away from their recycling bins and boxes.
“Even a message of if in doubt ask your local authority would be beneficial,” he said. “Recycling for the sake of recycling will never work. At the end of the day a product needs to be manufactured from the material collected and rubbish in at the front end will often provide rubbish out at the back end.”
Commingled
Mr Dumpleton did, however, reject PaperChain's comments regarding commingled collections.
“All the paper Mills should be interested in is receiving the right quality of material at the right price from sustainable sources. Commingling of recyclables is here to stay and all the efforts should be put into improving quality right through the chain. From the public who put material in the containers; to the hauliers who collect it and to the facilities who process it. Get these things right and the quality problems go away.”
| Related links: |
Meanwhile, the day before Recycle Now Week got underway on Saturday, a WRAP director was cited in a Perthshire newspaper “strongly” criticising the use of materials recycling facilities (MRFs), which are needed to sort material from commingled collections.
In a letter attacking a local recycling proposal, non-executive director Nick Francis, who has since stepped down from the position at WRAP, was quoted as saying: “Currently there's an assumption that collecting all material mixed together is a good thing, and then having it sorted out at a big factory called a Material Reclamation Facility – we like to call them Murfs – is a good way and an economic way of making recycling collections. This is a complete fallacy…It will come back to bite them hard when, in the longer term, this material will not be saleable.”
Register for free to comment