Where Does My Recycling Go?

Recycling Copper, Steel and Aluminum is worthwhile though and you can tell because it's a profitable industry all by itself. No guilt trip needed to get people to do it. I'm most against government programs to force people to recycle. If you cannot convince someone to recycle something by discussion you have no right to FORCE them to do it with government.

Recycling is an industrial process.

Shipping it halfway across the world for reprocessing uses resources in the process. Who knows for sure whether any individual act of recycling is of any benefit?

It's always a tradeoff between one resource and another. Saving trees by recycling paper pollutes the water because of chemicals needed to remove the inks. Recycling plastics pollutes the air. Take your pick.

The Eight Great Myths of Recycling

http://www.perc.org/pdf/ps28.pdf

Aha, good question! I'd like to know too..... so here's what I found....

Recycle Now

says;

Information collected for Defra by the Environment Agency on packaging waste shows how much material is exported and how much is recycled in the UK:

Material Reprocessed in the UK / Reprocessed Abroad

Paper 49% / 51%

Glass 81% / 19%

Aluminium 66% / 34%

Plastic 33% / 67%

Wood 100% / 0%

The CPI figures, which include newsprint, indicate a balance of about 47% domestic reprocessing and 53% export.

A bit more detail about London's waste from Westminster Council who say;

Paper and magazines are transported to Kent, Germany, other European Countries and the Far East - principally China for reprocessing.

Glass - Once the mixed glass is segregated, the materials are transported to Yorkshire and London for reprocessing. Mixed glass recycling is used as an aggregate in road surfacing projects. This product is called 'glasphalt'. Westminster then uses glasphalt in some of the road resurfacing projects in the city.

Steel cans are sorted and compressed for reprocessing in England and Wales and Aluminum cans are reprocessed in Birmingham.

Mixed plastic bottles are transported to Europe and the Far East for reprocessing.

and this website from the BBC shows in pictures where Barnett's recycling goes -

Glass is taken to a factory in Harlow, Essex, about 30 miles away. “Nine times out of 10 it becomes a Stella bottle”, says Mr Tutt!

Paper is sent off about 60 miles around the M25 to Aylesford Newsprint in Kent.

Cans are taken about 200 miles away to a site in Llanelli, Carmarthenshire

Clothes are collected for Oxfam by Soex, a German multi-national which collects about 2,000 tonnes a year of fabric in the UK. They are taken by truck to one of its recycling plants abroad, for instance in Poland, Russia, Romania, Bulgaria or Hungary

... and a good report on Green Girls Global - It feels so virtuous putting the paper in the recycling box rather than chucking it in the bin (I hesitate every time I put something in the bin these days - asking myself if there’s anything else I can do with the item dangling over the waste abyss… or whether the god of recycling is about to strike me down!)

My waste in

Somerset is summarised here, but WRAP also has much info on recycling & waste reduction.

Hi Jimjam

I don't know where in London you live, but earlier in the year The Guardian published an interesting article about this issue and looked at what Hackney council do with their recycling. Apparently a surprisingly high amount is actually processed here in the UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/25/recycling-local