Swindon to launch mixed plastic kerbside recycling

The service, which will run alongside the Wiltshire local authority's existing fortnightly plastic bottle collections, is set to be rolled out to all 80,000 households in the borough, making it one of the few councils in the UK to currently offer residents an opportunity to recycle a comprehensive range of mixed plastics at the kerbside.

The council said that the inclusion of the material – which includes food trays, yoghurt pots, plastic bags, shampoo bottles and plastic takeaway tubs – would not add to the costs of running its existing plastic bottle collection, which is around £420,000 a year.

Both the current fortnightly plastic bottle collection which uses a clear plastic sack and weekly commingled collections of dry recyclables are carried out by the council's own arms-length company Swindon Commercial Services.

A spokesman for the council told letsrecycle.com: “What we're saying to residents, as a simple guide, is that if it's plastic and it's been used to contain food or household cleaning products, and it isn't black, we can accept it for recycling.”

“We have no specific target for mixed plastic alone, but since the kerbside recycling service was introduced across all of Swindon – 180,000 residents – two years ago, the amount of household waste recycled has gone up from 19% to 44%,” he added.

Currently only a small number of councils offer a kerbside collection for mixed plastics due to the lack of UK reprocessing facilities available for the material stream.

However, mixed plastic recycling remains a key area of interest for the recycling sector, with WRAP last week publishing extensive research work into the technical and commercial viability of reprocessing the material (see letsrecycle.com story), while plastics recycling organisation Recoup has published guidance on how local authorities could look to implement schemes (see letsrecycle.com story).