Is the glass always greener?
What happens to London’s recycling? Amid scare stories of bags being
shipped to the Far East or simply dumped in landfill, Tom Howard
followed an empty wine bottle from his doorstep in Teddington to see
where it ended up.
1. Recycling box
Sunday morning. My empty bottle of (delicious) Montes Chilean Sauvignon
Blanc is dumped in our recycling box. Like the majority of London
boroughs, Richmond provides plastic boxes for domestic recycling. A
kerbside service, where the householder divides up different materials,
is offered to 2.1 million households in the capital, mainly because
green, amber and clear glass are easier to separate, resulting in a
better quality product for glass manufacturers. In some boroughs, all
domestic recycling is thrown into a plastic sack (known as
‘comingled’), which is more convenient, easier and cheaper to collect,
but means glass is more likely to be ‘contaminated’ by aluminium,
plastic, paper and so on when it goes to the glass manufacturers.
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2. Kerbside collection and sorting.
Thursday morning. The council truck rattles along our street and picks
up our glass box, with the wine bottle in it. Inside the truck, my wine
bottle is sorted by hand into the green-bottle section. It typically
takes five or six hours to completely fill the truck, a lot less during
the Xmas and New Year period, and a matter of minutes if it’s visiting
Mick Jagger’s house. Richmond operates a weekly collection of recycling
into specially designed vehicles with up to 11 removable containers.
The vehicles cost up to £120,000 each but, as the demand for domestic
recycling increases, and council recycling targets go up, these
vehicles are becoming too small. Richmond plans to roll out a new fleet
in the next 18 months.
3. Twickenham MRF
The ultimate destination for all recycling in Richmond is the MRF
(Materials Recovery Facility) in Twickenham, a noisy, windswept
site next to Harlequins rugby ground. A forklift removes each container
from the trucks and tips their contents into huge piles in large bays –
my bottle, sadly, didn’t survive the journey, and now sits in several
different pieces on top of five lorryloads of mostly green glass. The
MRF processes 150 tons of glass every week, but in the period following
New Year, the piles of glass nearly stretch out to meet each other.
Depending on the quality of the sorting, recycling can be quite
lucrative for councils – mixed aluminium and tin will sell for
around £90 a ton, but separated and baled aluminium can fetch up to
£700 per ton. This is why Richmond has installed an expensive conveyor
belt system that uses magnets and compressed air to separate its cans.
Clear and amber glass, both more scarce, sells for £27 and £24 per ton,
while the more abundant green goes for £19.50 a ton, which means
Richmond makes a whopping 0.0093615p from my bottle.
4. Transfer to OI Glass
Far from ending up in Bali as I was secretly hoping, Richmond’s glass
in fact heads next to the not-quite-as-exotic Harlow in Essex,
headquarters of OI Glass, which buys all the borough’s booty. Large
hauliers, which can hold 27 tons of glass, pick up from the MRF and
make the 25-mile journey to Harlow five times a week. A similar truck
can only take three tons of plastic bottles, which partially explains
why plastic recycling is slow to be taken up by a lot of London
boroughs.
5. Reprocessing
The final destination for my pieces of broken bottle is OI’s huge plant
on an industrial estate in Harlow. Nowadays it’s virtually impossible
to manufacture glass without cullet (colour separated, recycled glass)
– it melts at a lower temperature than the virgin raw materials (sand,
limestone and soda ash) used to make glass from scratch, so furnaces
can be set at much lower and safer temperatures. This results in huge
energy savings for OI so it’s in its interest to promote and encourage
glass recycling. Thus it’s only too happy to take me on a tour of the
plant, where I see the entire process. Unlike some manufacturers who
sell on their surplus to be used in road-building and as an aggregate
substitute, all of the green glass OI buys goes into the furnace. Green
cullet is first sieved and examined for impurities (such as glass
cookware), then magnets remove any metal, and air takes away any paper.
It’s crushed, mixed with raw materials and baked at 1,600ÞF (Gas Mark
72!) in a giant furnace. Red-hot gobs of glass are then ejected into
the mould, and after controlled cooling and further quality checks,
you’re left with a new green bottle, comprised of 80 per cent cullet.
6. The new bottle
The new bottle is packed up and sent to Scottish And Newcastle
Breweries, where its reincarnation as a bottle of Kronenberg 1664 will
be completed. Cheers.
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