Mr Russell, who is head of wastes management at West Sussex, took a seven-day tour of two plastics plants and two major paper mills in China as part of a party that also included representatives from Viridor, the county's recycling contractor.
– Phillip Russell, West Sussex CC
While demand from China for materials remains strong, the council has doubts concerning markets in the UK as it seeks to reach a 45% recycling rate by 2015.
Mr Russell said: “Working with Viridor, our recycling contractor, we need to ensure there is a ready and continuing marketplace and if there are insufficient outlets in the UK, the choice would be either have them buried in landfill or send them to outlets in Europe which are becoming increasingly expensive and are also under capacity pressure.”
“There is a flourishing market in China for plastics which are crushed before being spun into a fibre and sent back to us in items of clothing such as fleeces. There is also a very high demand for paper and the mills there are expanding all the time,” he explained.
Conditions
Mr Russell said he was satisfied at the working conditions within the plants, and that the operations did not use any workers under the age of 18. Transporting material all the way to China for recycling would not be expensive, he said, because “for every six containers of materials being imported into this country from China, only one returns full”.
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“In terms of transporting waste it would also mean fewer long distance road journeys because we are so close to Southampton docks,” he added.
Mr Russell will report back to county councilors at a seminar in the autumn and discuss the state of the UK recycling market. He said: “Exporting to China is only an option at this stage, and a great deal more work and investigation needs to be done before we as a waste disposal authority can commit ourselves to any long term arrangement.”
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