Request
| 1.Please tell me, are there any types of item that you accept for recycling according to the information that you provide to households, but which cannot in fact be recycled? (For example, it has been claimed on social media that black plastic food containers which are widely used in supermarkets cannot be recycled.) If there are any such types of item, please list them and also please tell me what happens to such material. 2.Also please tell me if general waste which includes plastic items that cannot be recycled such as hard plastic, might end up in landfill, and if so, to what extent this is likely. Please tell me if general waste which includes plastic items that cannot be recycled such as hard plastic, might end up in landfill, and if so, to what extent this is likely. |
Response
2. NLWA Response: 2.1. North London Waste Authority (NLWA) manages the recycling for six of the seven borough councils within the NLWA area, namely, Barnet, Camden, Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest. All the material we list in the information provided to households as ‘acceptable for recycling’ is included in the specification list of materials accepted by the Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) that we use to sort the recycling from north London homes, so it can be recycled. 2.2. Not every local authority includes black trays in their mixed recycling. However, in north London, black plastic trays can be put into the recycling. This is because the specification for the MRFs, which sort north Londoners’ recycling into the different individual materials, includes black plastic. So, if black plastic is clean, it is not a contaminant in recycling loads.
2.3. In relation to your second question about general waste which includes plastic items, such as hard plastic, a proportion will be disposed to landfill. In 2017-18 NLWA disposed of 78,959 tonnes of local authority collected residual waste to landfill, 9.5% of the total. This information is publicly available in our Annual Strategy Monitoring Report available on our corporate website (see page 32) which provides fuller details about what happens to the waste that we manage.
2.4. For hard plastics specifically we advise the following: “As of March 2018 we changed our policy on accepting hard plastics such as children’s toys and hard plastic containers. There is no longer a cost-effective market for recycling such goods. We regret that we will not therefore be accepting hard plastics for recycling at this site (Regis Road Recycling Centre, Camden) unless the items are in a good condition and can be reused. Any reusable hard plastic items such as toys will be put aside for collection and delivery to the Second Time Around shop at the Kings Road Reuse and Recycling Centre where they will be sold. Any hard plastic item that is not reusable should be put into the container marked for disposal.”
