As a popular actress and comedian, Helen Lederer has very little time to take recycling seriously. Like most of us she tends to open up a packet and throw it away with the rest of the rubbish. So Ever Wondered sent her out to discover what actually happens to the rubbish we so readily throw away…

First stop Cringle Dock, a waste transfer station…

Helen: Adam Read, you are a Waste Consultant, what do you do?

Adam Read: Well Helen, waste is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t until about 1940 that we started to throw away materials. Now we’re looking at a much more complicated business

Helen: Right. So what’s going on here.

Adam Read: Well this machine collects five London borough’s waste and transfers it down the river by barge, this can amount to 1000 tons every day.

Helen: 1000 tons, and what kind of things are in it?

Adam Read: All sorts of materials. Let’s go and take a look.

Helen: So what is rubbish?

Adam Read: When I’m advising the councils on recycling or waste management policies, I can use up to 192 different categories. So we aggregate to usually 30 main types, and today I’m going to be using six main categories.

Helen Lederer: Six main categories from my personal rubbish.

Adam Read: It’s very typical of the British dustbin. In here we have a big pile of newspapers, high degradable, perhaps 50 years in a landfill site.

Plastic bags, bane of our life. Very difficult to process, the technology’s not quite there but if you bury it, it will take hundreds and hundreds of years before it’s decomposed. Textiles, not really a problem. Easy to re-use, easy to recycle, you can bury it, it will degrade.

Compost, your compost pile will pollute ground water in a landfill site as it rots. Best thing is compost it at home. Tins, Steel and aluminium cans. Lot of market value there, easy to recycle, you don’t want to put it in a hole in the ground because it’ll rust. Finally different coloured bottles and jars, easy to recycle, have been doing it for many years. Don’t want to bury it as it can take thousands of years to degrade.

Helen: Thousands of years to degrade, two seconds to drink bottle of wine. What shall I do next?

Adam Read: Well, this is only the beginning of the cycle. You need to go and ask an expert about the processes.

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Next stop a 25 year old rubbish landfill site to meet waste expert Dr Dominic Hogg…

Helen: Now Dominic what actually is going on in this is site?

Dr. Dominic Hogg: Well we landfill about 82% of all UK municipal waste, so this is where all your stuff comes. The reason we’ve done this is that it’s cheap, but the fact that it’s cheap means that there’s no incentive to do other things with the materials like recycling and composting.

The other thing that’s going to happen over the next two decades is we’re going to be forced by European law to stop doing as much of this as we are at the moment, and we’re going to have to significantly change our waste management practices.

Helen: This feels a bit like The Long Good Friday where they get rid of unwanted people!!

Dr. Dominic Hogg: Yes this is where they burn the rubbish for energy. This deals with just under 10% of the UK municipal waste. If we’re going to move waste away from landfill we’ve got to do other things with it, this is one of the options

Helen: Now what are the advantages of recycling?

Dr. Dominic Hogg: Well take a material like aluminium. Aluminium’s valuable in itself. This sort of material will fetch £500-£600 a ton. We produce a lot more clear glass than we would like. We’re actually importing a lot of green glass in the form of wine. Wine consumption’s going up, we’re actually now having difficulty finding markets for this, so we’re now exporting it as far abroad as Chile.

Helen: Mm, well this smells quite interesting, what’s in it Dominic?

Dr. Dominic Hogg: Your garden waste. That’s been composted down to produce a soil improver that you can use on your garden. We think that 35-40% of municipal waste could be dealt with this way.

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