Local company ECT cited as fine example in BBC exposé
The BBC1 programme “Real Story” has left householders feeling betrayed, questioning the purpose of their recycling efforts and councils investigating what, exactly, happens to their recycled rubbish after the programme revealed 500 tonnes had been shipped unsorted to Indonesia.
Jakarta Customs tipped off the BBC after they impounded containers holding mixed up paper, cardboard, plastics and cans from British households and linked to a company contracted to process recycling by councils in the South of England.
According to the Environment Agency, around half of the 8 million tons of green bin material thrown out each year in the UK ends up overseas. Contractors who export waste instead of processing it in the UK are not breaking any law - as long as it is properly sorted and cleaned so that foreign mills and factories can recycle it. However, the Indonesian authorities classified the 80,000 green bins worth of material seen by Real Story as hazardous waste.
After checking the containers held up at Jakarta's Tanjung Priok docks, the investigating team went to the address given on the shipping documents as the waste's final destination, a Japanese restaurant on the outskirts of the city.
As well as British newspapers and food wrappers, the team also found mail addressed to residents in London.
It is the duty of each local authority to ensure that their recycling and waste management contractors or in-house services provide the duty of care documentation necessary to allow transparent recycling audits at a satisfactory level for both the authority and its residents.
Local company ECT, featured in The Real Story and employed by both Hounslow and Ealing Councils, began 25 years ago as a community transport service, and has since developed into one of the largest social enterprises in the UK. They have recently been awarded a 7 year waste management contract for Ealing Council – the largest contract ever to be awarded to a Community Recycler.
ECT use an ‘at-source-separation’ system which allows ECT Recycling to ensure that their materials are suitable for recycling mills either in the UK or Europe. The company was also praised for their ability to prove through its audit trail system that 99.5% of the source separated materials its collects are recycled. Their system tracks what enters and leaves the recycling depots and what happens to it.
This arrangement, while a simple legal requirement, provides opportunity for participating residents to understand where their recycling goes and could form the basis of a UK wide householder education and promotion campaign that further underpins the message that we all must recycle more.
26 million tonnes of household waste is produced every year in the UK. More and more focus and investment has been put into getting us to recycle. However, it’s not just a matter of recycling but, as the programme illustrated, what is done with materials once collected.
Recycling works when it’s sorted and cleaned, either at the kerbside or in well-run Materials Recycling Facilities (MRFs). If recycling is left unsorted it is difficult to recycle and extract value from it anywhere in the world, with this in turn undermining householder’s confidence that they should continue to recycle.
December 13, 2005 |