What Happens to Your Recycling

What happens to the recycling and waste?

Your recycling and waste goes on to have a new lease of life!

Food waste

• Food waste goes to an anaerobic digestion facility, where it creates gas for the national grid and fertiliser for farmland.

Garden waste

• Is turned into compost using an outdoor windrow process, before being spread on local fields.

Paper & cardboard

• The paper and cardboard is sent to a paper mill where it is made into new paper or cardboard products, such as boxes, notepaper or toilet roll inner tubes.

Plastic, cans & glass

• These materials are taken to a Materials Recovery Facility in Four Ashes near Wolverhampton. Here the different types of materials are separated, using a mixture of human and mechanical sorting, before being sent on for further sorting and recycling.
• The glass can be made into new glass products such as bottles, it can also be used as an aggregate for road bases or made into glass wool fibre for insulating homes.
• The metal cans are made into new items such as cans, but could also be made into car parts or parts of aeroplanes!
• The plastic is either turned into new plastic food packaging or it is made into things like drain pipes and garden furniture.

Click here for a video showing what happens to your recycling after it's been collected. 

Here's the journey your plastic milk bottles take - from your home, to the Veolia plastic recycling facility, and back again.

What about the things that can't be recycled?

The red top bin materials go to an Energy Recovery Facility, to be used as a fuel for making electricity.  Veolia have two local sites, one in Shrewsbury and one in Wolverhampton, you can find out more about the process here