Waste and Recycling
Where does all the material go?
There are frequent question about what happens to the recycling we collect.
Co-mingled Glass, Cans & Mixed Plastics – Lancashire Renewables, Leyland.
Your glass, cans and mixed plastics are collected from our Church depot by Lancashire Renewables Ltd.
The material stream is loaded into a material sorting unit which first uses a ‘trommel’ to recover the glass then a combination of hand picking and under an over band magnets. The magnets removes all of the cans and the remaining plastics have a final sort by hand.
The glass material is also sorted by size, and the plant creates a number of output grades depending on the specifications of its customers.
Once sorted and cleaned the output materials roughly fall into two types, glass cullets, large pieces of glass e.g. 10mm and greater for glass re-melt and glass fines e.g. 10mm and less which can be used as road aggregates.
- Mixed glass is sent to Recresco at Ellesmere port
- Aluminium is sent to Novelis at Warrington
- Steel is sent to EMR at Blackburn
- PET is sent to Clean Tech at Hemswell
- HD Natural is sent to Biffa Polymers at Redcar
- HD Jazz is sent to Regain Polymers at Castleford
- HD Natural / HD Jazz is sent to Paprec in France
Mixed Paper, Cardboard and Food and Drink Cartons – Lancashire Renewables, Leyland.
Your paper, cardboard and waxed cartons are collected from our Church depot by Lancashire Renewables Ltd.
In a mixture of automated and manual processes, paper and cardboard material is first separated and then sorted into more refined streams to ensure the highest quality of raw material for recycling. In fact, they regularly achieve reject rates of 1% or less, against an industry average of anything between 2% and 15%.
- Paper goes to Smurfit Kappa recycling in Blackburn.
- Cardboard and Waxed Cartons go to Saica Paper Mill in Manchester.
Household Batteries – Valpak
Your household batteries are collected from our depot in Church by Valpak.
Their expertise means that they can offer market security through their network of UK and overseas reprocessing partners. In turn, this means that they can provide both cost-efficient and dependable solutions for their obligation to increase recycling and to reduce landfill.
Valpak are dedicated to ensuring that all of our materials are handled in a responsible manner.
Textiles – Salvation Army
Your textiles are sold from our depot to the Salvation Army.
They collect textiles and clothing throughout the UK. All the items are brought back to their depot and weighed. The goods are sorted to the specification of our customers by our highly trained staff and then exported to our customers worldwide as reusable clothing and shoes.
Grades of a heavier quality which are not suitable for wear are sent to local mills for shredding mainly for the bedding industry.
Established in 1935 they have great experience and knowledge of recycling textiles and clothing. In April 1998 they were honoured to receive the Queens Award for Export and are members of the Textile Recycling Association and Recyclatex, the only bonded textile scheme in the country.
Their aim is to eliminate waste which goes to landfill and is currently running at 1.2%.