The conveyor belt whizzes past, carrying waste that residents have put in their recycling bins. Moving almost as fast, a handful of pickers remove items that shouldn’t be there (a negative pick) or collect ones that should (a positive pick). Cardboard packaging, aluminium cans and plastic bottles all fly by and will be recycled. But so too do keyboards, baking trays, dustpans, and an awful lot of flexible packaging – sweet wrappers, bread bags and the like – all of which are ‘contaminants’.
“The cleaner the stream, the quicker you can run everything,” explains Richard Hinchcliffe, regional manager at Suez Recycling and Recovery UK, which operates the plant near Bedlington under a contract with Northumberland County Council, “and the less residual waste we send to energy from waste [incineration] or landfill.”
These are the cards – or rather the cans, containers, and contaminants – the UK’s waste collectors are dealt. They are beholden to what people pop...