The shocking truth is that tons of waste that have been sorted by UK residents for recycling has actually been already buried in landfills. Officials have denied this for years, but they finally admitted that a lot of the waste that the councils claim to be recycled is actually sent away by garbage depots.
A recent study made by the DEFRA or the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs state that many plant managers say that a lot of the waste that are being sent to them is unusable. This piece of news confirm many resident’s fears- that after they have been forced to follow strict recycling rules, the recycling process just actually ends there.
It’s been eight years since weekly rubbish and trash rounds have been reduced to fortnight collections. The reasoning for this was less collections actually reduced carbon, as well as landfill emissions. Families have even resorted to segregating rubbish into different waste bins, and according to official figures, about 43% of overall waste is recycled compared to just 30% from years ago.
Unfortunately, today’s recycling is experiencing a levelling off and there just seems to be more and more household waste being sent to incinerators.
Recycling has now levelled off, however, and huge amounts of household rubbish sent to incinerators that generate power are going up. Now, we find out that the levels reported for recycling are actually exaggerated. DEFRA, an organisation under Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, was the first to break this piece of news in a released document.
The actual document contains a warning stating that the current rates of recycling are potential overestimates because many do not even account for the things that are rejected by the materials recovery facility because of their fast way of recycling.
MRFs actually segregate materials collected from households into metal, paper and plastic among others. Then, these materials are sent to plants for reprocessing, which look for usable products. However, many reprocessing managers have stated that with the materials they are sent, they is only very little or hardly any that can be used again.