It’s not Quantity its Quality that Matters T


by CHARLIE TROUSDELL Th e man in the know!


he waste and resource industry is hugely varied and complex but at its most basic it is, in reality,


about ensuring householders and businesses have their ‘rubbish’ taken away properly. Whether this is a council providing a household collection or a skip company providing skips, what actually gets placed in the ‘bin’ and which ‘bin’ it is in is important.


Over the last few months there has been a lot of comment in the trade press about poor quality of recyclate due to contamination. Plastic is a huge problem especially when it gets placed in green waste bins and as a society we seem to be very bad at littering judging by the amount of litter along pavements and road verges. Researchers say a massive 8,300 million metric tons of virgin plastics have been produced to date - the vast majority (79%) ending up in our environment.


I use the word ‘rubbish’ deliberately but of course it is a po- tential resource; to a composter clean green waste is a great resource to make into soil conditioner, food waste to an anaerobic digester plant is the fuel to make energy and bio fertiliser, clean untreated wood goes into new panel board or animal bedding.


So, what’s all this to do with UROC you may well ask?


T e magic word is clean! If as an industry we can get better quality waste/resource or at least separate out at source as far as possible, end markets are improved and less waste ends up in landfi ll and business should be profi table as well as compliant.


large MRF facilities, with seriously expensive kit to sort out waste streams, getting reasonably clean segregated material to sort makes the job much easier and saves on disposal costs.


In busy yards with loads of unsorted waste arriving every few minutes, producing quality segregated outputs is diffi cult. Many companies do an excellent job doing this but tend to have invested millions in kit to do so and even then it is diffi cult to detect an individual skip of say soil contaminated with oils. By the time this is detected several hundred tonnes of quality material may well have been contaminated costing the company considerably more than it received in income!


So how can we try and get better ‘rubbish’? Oſt en for commercial businesses it is fairly easy, especially where there is room for multiple skips, compactors or ro- ro bins, so providing dedicated bins for source separated wastes which means much easier to manage and savings can be passed to the customer. Where only single bins are possible, providing bags for the awkward wastes could help.


Probably the biggest diffi culty is from private households who just want to clear out all their junk and just chuck everything in, not realising the tins of old garden chemicals etc are not permitted! Getting the message through to householders is hard but as many local authorities are fi nding using social media and web based campaigns is a cheap and eff ective way of getting the right message to residents.


For skip operators, the Environment Agency tends to think Most people want to do the right thing but just don’t know of a skip as a potentially mobile hazardous landfi ll! Slightly unfair, but of course householders tend to think they can throw anything in their hired skip and frequently do. If we can educate and encourage householders to ‘do the right thing’, for example put gypsum in a designated bag, old paints etc in another bag, rather than just chuck everything in, it then starts to get slightly easier to sort the skip back at the yard. T ere are numerous ways of achieving this and it will vary from each skip operator and location. T is could provide a competitive advantage to some operators. Ultimately the aim is to recycle or send waste for energy recovery, as much as practicably possible, and minimise what ends up in landfi ll.


For independent operators who vary from a small yard to 22


how. Our industry basically needs to improve how we communicate to our customers to get the right waste in the right place.


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