Christmas offers extra opportunities for recycling, Horsham councillor says

The problem though is that half of Britons are baffled by everyday recycling symbols, as The Times declared recently, and some might be surprised it is only half.

There are at least nine recycling symbols ranging from the ‘Mobius loop’ which means the products can be recycled to ‘The Green Dot’ which means that the manufacturer has made a financial contribution towards the recovery and recycling of packaging.

In theory, at least, practically everything can technically be recycled, but recycling requires outlets for processing materials and markets for those materials.

And those facilities do not, uniformly, exist throughout the country.

This is why there are differences between authorities as to what can be collected. For example, West Sussex can collect black plastic but that is because the county has access to an outlet for processing the material.

It is worth pointing out that the co-mingled materials in the blue-top bin go to a Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) at Ford where the various materials are separated and packed for the onward supply to processing plants.

But to help the operation of the MRF all recyclables need to be clean, dry and loose.

Plastic is a difficult material, particularly because there are over 50 different types.

The range of plastics which can be accepted may increase in future but at present they are confined to basically plastic bottles, food and fruit ready meal pots and plastic trays and lids provided the latter are not smaller than the average coffee jar lid.

Other recyclable materials are well known such as paper and cardboard (not shredded), metal cans, glass bottles and jars. Not so well known is that metal foil can be recycled.

If you are not sure it is metal foil, try the scrunch test.

If the material stays crumpled it is metal whereas if it unravels it is plastic.

And it is advisable to bundle up foil into a reasonable sized ball so that the foil doesn’t fall through the conveyor belt gaps at the MRF.

I am often asked whether plastic milk bottle tops can be recycled.

They are too small to be picked up by the MRF.

However, metal tops of any size can be picked up by the magnets at the MRF and plastic tops can be recycled in other ways, for example through charities such as the Springboard project in Horsham.

There is a long history of collecting paper and cardboard for recycling and I am old enough to remember when recycling was called ‘salvage’.

Shredded paper should never be put in the recycling bin or the paper and cardboard skips at Household Waste Recycling sites (HWRS).

Firstly, it clogs up the machinery at the MRF and, secondly, the shredding of paper reduces the length of the fibres and substantially reduces its value in creating new paper.

Other materials that cannot be recycled through Horsham’s blue top bin scheme may be recyclable at an HWRS, such as other metal items, batteries and small electrical items.

Also, Horsham District Council (HDC) is currently working on plans to introduce kerbside collections of batteries, textiles and small electricals on a trial basis in May next year.

The full range of materials that can be collected both by HDC and HWRS can be seen on-line on the HDC and West Sussex County Council websites and our recycling team at HDC are always willing to help if advice is needed.

And don’t forget, as we saw with milk bottle tops, there are other recycling opportunities apart from those offered by the public authorities.

For example, ‘Terra Cycle’ has a crisp packet recycling scheme and there is a separate scheme to raise funds for Kent, Surrey and Sussex Air Ambulance.

Further information is given on the HDC Recycling website pages.

Finally, we are seeing an increasing number of organisations using substitute materials for carrier bags and bags containing magazines and other periodicals.

They purport to be environmentally friendly because they are biodegradable and/or compostable.

Experiments by academics have shown that these bags can take years to biodegrade and in one experiment a collection of bags could be used as bags three years after they have been buried in the ground.

And even if they are genuinely biodegradable, it doesn’t mean they are compostable – certainly not at the rate of the normal green matter in your compost bin.

And please don’t put them in your green waste bin for collection as the County Council contractor regards them as contamination which, depending upon the amount of them in a particular load, could mean that the whole load to the composting site could be rejected.

In Horsham District, our recycling rate is now around 55 per cent and the innovations to come, including food waste collections, will push our figure up to something approaching 70 per cent.

We are grateful to our residents for all their help in achieving our success and look forward to even greater success with your support moving forward.