Your Questions About Recycling Answered

Local resident visits the new Southall Lane Materials Facility

All the questions you wanted to ask about your recycling (and never had the opportunity. A Chiswick resident has visited the new recycling centre and contributed this piece.

Southall Lane Materials Handling Facility organises occasional Open Days and it’s good to find out more about your rubbish. Dan Smyth, Operations Manager, answers some of our most pressing questions:

The more you can sort, the more they can recycle. The recycling team has 23 seconds for each house, so if you mix up your rubbish and they can’t deal with it in that short time, it is likely to be rejected, or to contaminate the waste so that we get a lower price for it.

Please rinse out cans (especially dog food) and plastics,. Some sorting is done by hand, so the less rank the more pleasant.

Paper: Do not include glitter, plastic or foil. Try and put cardboard and paper separately. Do not include shredded paper (that can go in your food waste, in small quantities).

Glass: Only “normal” glass, not plate glass, light bulbs, ceramic, pyrex or perfume bottles.

Textiles: Wrap them in something waterproof if there is a threat of rain – if they get wet then the whole load is contaminated.

Batteries: No longer collected. Take them to your supermarket or Halfords on the High Road.

Plastics: Absolutely no plastic bags – they cause stoppages in the machinery. No hard plastics, such as coat hangers, toys, flower pots. Remove lids from containers so they can be compacted easily. Black plastic food trays cannot be recycled, but if it’s too complicated, just put them in the plastic and they will deal with it.

Metals: Aluminium is the most valuable. Lids from jam and other jars, also good.

Ready-meal trays, tetrapak: The cardboard has a plastic liner bonded to it, so it can’t be recycled. In small amounts, this is not a problem, but large quantities should just go in your black waste bin.

Electrical equipment: Anything up to the size of a small microwave. It should be put in obvious position with the rest of the recycling.

Black bag waste: This goes to incineration for power generating, so not completely wasted.

If we follow these rules we can avoid creating landfill. Thanks to our state-of-the-art (and extremely expensive!) new waste facility, London Borough of Hounslow is achieving some of the highest prices of any London council for its waste.

June 30, 2018