According to waste management giants Veolia Environmental Services and SITA UK – which both offer a variety of glass collection services to customers – bring banks have been very successful in Europe and could help improve glass quality collected by councils in the UK.
The comments come in the wake of a growing trend among councils to remove bring banks and echo calls by glass industry body British Glass in July 2008 to bring banks back in place of commingled collections. This followed figures showing a fall in the amount of glass which was recycled into containers in 2007 because it was collected commingled and therefore not separated by colour (see letsrecycle.com story).
Jean-Dominique Mallet, chief executive of Veolia Environmental Services, told letsrecycle.com that the UK should look at the example set by much of Europe.
He said: “Bring banks are working everywhere on the continent. In France and Germany their design is very positive and they are very successful.
“If you can get more bring banks, I would favour separation of the glass,” he added.
David Palmer-Jones, chief executive of waste management firm SITA UK, added that banks could make a “vast” difference to material quality.
He said: “Separating glass from other recyclables, via bring-banks or kerbside collections, leads to a vast improvement in the quality of the material for reprocessing. And quality is improved further when the glass is separated into individual colours.”
British Glass
David Workman, director general of British Glass, said that he believed councils should adopt a “best of both” practice in using bring banks and commingled collections, with banks being allocated to hard-to-reach properties such as high rises and blocks of flats.
Mr Workman said: “We are clearly seeing some local authorities, not all, having sought to take out bottle banks when they introduce commingled collections and then they are collecting all colours mixed together and we would still prefer all material to come in separated.”
Difficulty
However, recycling officers told letsrecycle.com that they might be reluctant to re-install bring banks as they were not as convenient for residents as kerbside collections and did not capture such high tonnages.
Joy Blizzard, chair of the Local Authority Recycling Advisory Committee (LARAC), said: “It is always a toss-up between tonnages and convenience for the public. With the bring banks capture rates aren't as high and the councils would rather get higher tonnages and collect more material even if the quality from the bring banks is higher.”
Ron England of Yorkshire-based glass recyclers Glass Recycling UK – who installed the first bottle bank in the UK in 1977 – also warned that it would not necessarily be easy to convince local authorities to install more bring banks because they could be dissuaded by the cost.
He said: “If it did come through it would have to be done gradually because we can't duplicate the amount of vehicles needed logistically for it to work and we would be changing what most councils do now. Whether that is right or wrong, it would need a big turnaround.”
Political
Caution was also urged by recycling expert Jeff Cooper, former producer responsibility scheme manager at the Environment Agency, who claimed that there was local opposition to contend with when introducing bring sites.
He said: “Local authorities often faced public opposition to sitings of bottle banks and therefore limited the number of sites. More sites would have spread the load and therefore should have reduced opposition to sitings but there was a lack of political impetus over the recycling issue when bottle banks were first being set out.”
On the issue of quality, he added: “The glass industry should have done more to ensure that local authorities did not abandon three colour separation through more sophisticated pricing structures.”
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