What happens to your recycled waste?

Did you know, Woking Borough Council collects over 800 tonnes of recycling each month?

Woking Borough Council is responsible for collecting your recyclable waste and transporting it to a Materials Reprocessing Facility (MRF) in Leatherhead, Surrey operated by Grundon Waste Management.

Each year the Council collects around 35, 000 tonnes of waste from its 40,000 households. Almost 10,000 tonnes of this waste is mixed recyclables, collected in your blue-lidded recycling bin or blue recycling sack each fortnight. These recyclables are delivered to the MRF for sorting.

The recyclables deposited at the MRF are mechanically and manually sorted by material type. Once sorted, the separated materials are then baled prior to onward transportation to processing plants, where the materials are used to manufacture new products.

Where does your mixed recycling end up?

The Council has a statutory duty to report the end destination of all its recycling to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) every three months. For the period October to December 2008, your recycled waste was sent to the following destinations:

  • glass bottles and jars - J Day Aggregates, London

  • paper and cardboard - Peute Papier Recycling, Netherlands

  • plastic bottles - half sent to Adapt Recycling Ltd, Lancashire and half sent to J&A Young Ltd, Leicestershire

  • tins and cans - Firbanks Recycling Ltd, Bedfordshire.

Grundon's facility is subject to strict inspections by the Environment Agency, the Department of Transport and many local environmental groups. The Council also maintains close relations with Grundon's and Woking Councillors have, in the recent past, visited the MRF.

Grundon's also undertake their own internal checks of the materials provided to them by Woking residents to ensure the loads are reasonably free of contaminants. Where contaminants are found (for example, plastic bags or polystyrene) they are rejected from the waste stream and sent for energy recovery at a plant in Slough, Berkshire; not to landfill.

Currently, Woking are operating at a 2% rejection rate, which is extremely low. Residents efforts to ensure levels of contamination continue to remain as low as possible are vital and appreciated.