It is a stony-faced domestic duty on Thursday evening: crushing cans, rinsing wine bottles, washing out pesto jars and flattening cereal boxes for the "operatives" who will wake us at 7am with a roar of scrap metal and a crash of breaking glass as our green recycling box is emptied into their van.
Until a few weeks ago, the effort seemed worth it. By preventing all this waste going to landfill, we were saving the planet. Then the news broke that in China, where up to a third of Britain's recyclables end up, the industry had collapsed. In the economic downturn, demand for plastic bottles and other goods made from consumer waste had plummeted, leading to a drop in market prices - from £200 per tonne of mixed plastics to virtually zero in the space of four weeks. This month, official media in China reported that four-fifths of the country's recycling units had closed and millions of people would lose their jobs. As a result, thousands of tonnes of plastic were accumulating not just in China, but at council depots throughout Britain.
Gloomily, I embarked on a mission to find out whether this was true. If it was, there would be evidence of stockpiling. If not, I wanted to know how much of my recycling was still going to China only to be landfilled there. In fact, of the 12 items in my box, eight were ending their journey in Britain, one in Europe, one in India and only two in the Far East. Of the latter, one was a plastic carrier bag that should not strictly have been collected anyway.
It was a rosier picture than expected - due largely to the way in which Hackney, the London borough where I live, collects its waste. Its vehicles are divided into compartments so materials are kept separate: green bottles in one cage, brown bottles in another, the cardboard Weetabix packs and plastic milk bottles segregated so they fetch a higher price. These, I now know, are called "stillage vehicles" - and the method of collection is "kerbside sorting", where householder and operative work together to keep items distinct and free from contamination.
At the May Gurney depot in Edmonton, north London, where the vehicles go next, I see these items piled in bays 10ft high, sorted further by hand and collected by lorries that take them away for reprocessing. There is no sign of a build-up of materials and the vehicles are leaving fairly regularly, so the contents of my box is clearly going somewhere. The compacting of plastic bottles into mixed bales is the only automation that occurs on site.
Behind the vast hangar, I am shown the stinking hopper where food waste is tipped twice a day - the contents of the blue plastic "caddies" collected from doorsteps by the same stillage vehicles. This mouldering mash is mixed with garden waste at a site just across the road, superheated in an industrial composter and spread on the borough's parks.
The cheaper alternative is "commingled" recycling, where householders put everything except food into one plastic sack or bin which is hurled into a lorry and taken to a MRF (pronounced "murf"), or Materials Recovery Facility, where robotic technology separates recoverable items by size, weight and type. The most sophisticated plants can even distinguish clear PET (polyethylene terephthalate) from opaque HDPE (high-density polyethylene), the two types of polymer from which 99 per cent of all plastic bottles are made.
"You'll see laser eyelets that detect the different types of plastic, air jets to direct them into different waste streams, and human operatives doing the same kind of sorting by eye," says Mike Webster, of the environmental charity Waste Watch. "There are magnets to pick up steel cans, eddy current separators to flick off aluminium, and trommels [revolving drums] to remove different grades of paper."
It's a Wallace and Gromit world - but not a solution favoured by Hackney Council. "We, as a collection authority, pay more to maintain the quality of the recyclables," says councillor Alan Laing. "If you throw everything into one sack, and all those sacks are then thrown into the back of a rubbish truck, you have significant levels of contamination."
A council will never make money from selling recyclables, he emphasises; all it can hope to do is offset the cost of collection - and higher prices are associated with kerbside sorting. There is also an ethical consideration. This method, Laing and his colleagues believe, offers "the best chance of genuine recycling. We have satisfied ourselves, as much as we can, that these materials aren't just going somewhere else in the world to be landfilled."
That is not to say Hackney collects no commingled waste at all. About 50 per cent of its housing stock is on estates where there are no kerbside collections, and lack of space means one recycling hopper has to suffice for cardboard, mixed glass, plastic bottles, tins and cans. Only paper merits its own bin, because paper is worthless to recyclers if it gets mixed up with broken glass.
In these straitened times, more councils are saving money by switching to commingled collection. "The quality of material coming in is declining," says Martin Atkinson of Aylesford Newsprint in Kent, which turns waste paper, including Hackney's, into newspaper. "It doesn't matter to some councils whether the material gets incinerated - which is legitimate, in that it is turning waste into energy - or whether it is returned to its former state. There has been a push for councils just to get their tonnages up and collect it all together. The householder thinks it is going to be recycled, but that is often not the case. Over the past few years, there has been a big move towards commingling, which has had a detrimental effect."
Philip Tutt, a spokesman for the O-I Group, which turns glass from Hackney back into bottles at its plant in Harlow, Essex, agrees. "As long as glass is delivered to us in three separate colours - green, clear and brown - we can use it," he says. With commingled, the colours get mixed up. "If it's a mixed load, it can't be remanufactured into brown glass," says Tutt. "If it's contaminated by other materials, that is a problem for us. It will then get sold off for another final use, whether it is road aggregate, roof lagging or something else. It's not true recycling, and that's down to the local authority."
What's more, poor-quality recyclables are more likely to be shipped abroad - particularly to the Far East where, until the crash, manufacturers clamoured for our waste no matter how contaminated it was. In 2007, it emerged that in the London Borough of Camden (which had opted for commingled collection in a bid to cut costs), 90 per cent of newspapers and pamphlets collected from boxes was being sent to Indonesia and 10 per cent to Malaysia, while 80 per cent of paper was going to India and the remaining 20 per cent to China.
"The issue is one of quality," says Stuart Foster of Recoup, an independent advisory body for plastics recycling. "If you try to sell rubbish into the recycling market, you won't get very much money for it - but China will accept a lower quality, generally, than UK processors. Those [councils] that didn't pay attention to quality when the going was good, that were half-hearted in the way they separated material, are the ones that have been caught out."
In those boroughs, mountains of paper, cans and baled plastic bottles will be building up - but householders should not give up on recycling. "There is still demand for material," Foster insists. "Companies are trading, material is moving and plastic is fetching from £40 to £100 a tonne." The solution, he says, is for councils to re-sort their plastic, removing paper and debris, to make it more acceptable to UK reprocessors. In six months, Foster reckons, recyclers in Britain will have developed the capacity to deal with the surplus.
In my quest to find out where the food packaging in my box goes, I discovered that the cleaner, kerbside-sorted variety not only fetches higher prices but is processed closer to home. Indeed, if you look at the London Borough of Hackney website, the recipients of my box contents are listed quite transparently: paper bags and wrappers go to Aylesford Newsprint in Kent, 33 miles away, for instance, while my riesling bottles are made back into wine bottles by the O-I Group in Harlow, Essex, just 22 miles from my front door. There is no mention of anything going abroad, yet my own analysis shows the items in my box could, between them, travel 17,260 miles - and that is excluding some legs of what is a fairly circuitous journey. Only two items are likely to go to China or Taiwan, but the distances are still shocking.
My aim was to look at how far the items have to travel before they are turned back into something useful: a sack of plastic flakes made from bottles doesn't count, but a fleece jacket made from that plastic does. Hackney, by comparison, follows progress only as far as the initial processor - and has no legal duty to track where they go after that.
In time, I spoke to every single recipient of every type of recyclable from my kitchen, asking where it might feasibly be sold and, in most cases, where it might be sold on next. Some travelled huge distances (not just to China, but to India and Taiwan), others shorter distances (Cheshire, Kent) only to be landfilled or incinerated there. Some, which should never have been collected anyway, were likely to be incinerated a few miles from my home - joining the estimated 200,000 tonnes of "recycling" (about two per cent of the total) that gets burnt or sent to landfill by UK councils every year, according to a survey published last month. The worst offenders, Medway and Peterborough councils, sent 11 per cent of recyclable waste to landfill sites or incinerators.
Hackney, by comparison, is an exemplary borough trying to do the right thing. What did councillor Laing have to say about my well-travelled box contents? "We are part of a global market when it comes to recyclates," he admits, "so inevitably some will end up going abroad where there is a demand for those sorts of materials." He finds an unexpected ally in Waste Watch, which points out that recyclables ending up in China isn't the environmental crime that many critics believe it is. "Where do all our plastic goods come from?" Mike Webster asks, rhetorically. "They come from China - so that is where the demand will be. Ships bring plastic goods here, and they would just be going back full of water ballast if we didn't fill them with our discarded plastic - which actually makes it carbon-neutral. We would much prefer to see all of it dealt with at home, where it keeps the UK economy going, has a smaller footprint and where you can keep a better eye on what is happening to it. But if that isn't happening, I would rather have it recycled in China than landfilled here."
Before the Chinese collapse, says Stuart Foster of Recoup, between half and two-thirds of plastic bottles collected in Britain were ending up in China - down from 75 per cent in 2006. That improvement is due largely to the opening of the Closed Loop London plant in Dagenham, capable of turning 35,000 tonnes of used bottles back into food-grade plastic per year. That facility cost £13m to develop, and a further £8m and £10m respectively have been invested in hi-tech plastic recycling plants in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. Within two years, Foster believes these plants will be capable of recycling the vast majority of the 180,000 tonnes of plastic bottles collected in Britain every year: "Chinese markets, if they recover, should be the backstop only."
So the race is on for Britain to recycle more of its own waste independently of China. "If we don't meet our targets," councillor Laing explains, "we will end up with more going to landfill and incineration - and that brings additional cost to us." Under UK law, councils pay £40 for every tonne of rubbish sent to landfill. "It is a cost timebomb," Laing points out. "We are facing, over the next 20 years, a bill that is the equivalent of shutting down social services because of landfill tax. We all have to carry on recycling."
• Read more on recycling from Andrew Purvis at Word of Mouth, observer.co.uk/foodblog
Opaque plastic bottle (HDPE)
Travels 168 miles
Destination: Runcorn, Cheshire
Opaque bottles made from HDPE are sent by road to JFC Delleve in Runcorn, in mixed bales with clear and coloured PET bottles. An optical sorter uses lasers to identify the different plastic types and separate them using air jets. On site, HDPE is made into drainage pipe for agriculture and construction.
Upside: The pipe is all sold in Britain, cutting transport costs and emissions.
Squeezable bottle
Travels 180 miles
Destination: landfill, Merseyside
"There's a barrier layer inside this plastic bottle," says Andy Bagnall at JFC Delleve. The outside is polypropylene, which the lasers will allow through, but its composite construction is a problem. "It would probably be ejected in the final sort, then baled up with the other rigid plastics such as yoghurt pots and margarine tubs, which are landfilled or sometimes re-sorted in the Midlands."
Upside: Nearly 99 per cent of plastic bottles collected are HDPE or PET.
Clear plastic bottles
Travels 335 miles
Destination: Lisburn, Northern Ireland
Clear or blue-tinted PET is separated from the mixed bales arriving at JFC, where it is made into high-grade PET flakes. These are sold on to recyclers ("most likely in Britain", though JFC would not say exactly where), then to manufacturers of, say, food packaging. "A tray might be virgin PET where it touches meat," says JFC, "and recycled PET on the outside."
Upside: Clear plastic goes almost full circle: a bottle made into a food tray.
Cardboard/cereal boxes
Travels 64 miles
Destination: Fordham, Cambridgeshire
Cardboard is taken to Kemsley in Kent, where it is pulped at the St Regis mill. Staples, plastic and glue are removed and the pulp is turned into corrugated case material (CCM): ridged cardboard between two layers of paper. Reels of it are taken by lorry to a factory such as Fordham, near Newmarket. The board is cut into panels, tinted and made into boxes.
Upside: Within 14 days, recycled cardboard can be back in service as a box.
Squeezable plastic (PET)
Travels 100 miles
Destination: the Midlands
This is made from the same PET material as clear drinks bottles. It would be made into high-grade flakes by JFC in Runcorn, then sold on to a recycler, perhaps ending up as palette strap (used to bind heavy loads on lorries) or food packaging film made by a company in, say, the Midlands.
Upside: This squeezable bootle is 100 per cent recyclable.
Coloured plastic bottle (PET)
Travels 6,082 miles
Destination: Taipei, Taiwan
Most drinks bottles are made from PET - and where the recycled flakes end up depends on how pure, clean and colour-free the reprocessor can get them. Coloured bottles like these are low-grade and used to make fibre for fleeces or jackets. "They could end up anywhere," says Michael Flynn of JFC Delleve. "Fibre production for clothing is based abroad, in lower labour-cost markets."
Upside: JFC says all the plastic it sells abroad is recycled, never landfilled.
Plastic carrier bag
Travels 5,059 miles
Destination: Beijing, China
Householders put recyclables in plastic bags -but officially, Hackney does not take them.
For every 40 bales of plastic bottles sent to JFC, the contractor (May Gurney) is allowed to send one bale of bags. This is low-grade recyclate and almost worthless, so it will most likely be "shunted to the Far East", says Doug Teesdale of May Gurney. The rest will be incinerated virtually next door.
Upside: All waste burnt at Edmonton provides electricity for the National Grid.
Tetra packs
Travels 46 miles
Incinerator, Kemsley, Kent
The bane of recyclers, Tetra Paks contain cardboard, metal foil and plastic. Hackney does not collect them (though they can be taken to recycling banks) but some slip through as cardboard which is pulped at Kemsley.
Paper fibres are recovered, while the plastic and foil are removed and incinerated on site.
Upside: Tetra Pak has pledged to provide five collection points in every UK borough - and to transport the troublesome cartons to Sweden for recycling.
Aluminium
Travels 164 miles
Destination: Warrington, Cheshire
A mix of cans, tins and trays is taken by lorry to AMG in Llanelli, Wales, where it is shredded to make "a homogenous feed stock", says Jason Carpenter, director of AMG Resources. The aluminium (mainly drinks cans) is "pinged off" using an electromagnetic current, while paper labels and the plastic liners and tubes from aerosols are removed. The aluminium is crushed into bales and sold exclusively to a company in Warrington, to be made into new cans.
Upside: Perfect! A drink can made into a drink can.
Steel tins
Travels 4,735 miles
Destination: Bhilai, India
At AMG Llanelli, steel tins are shredded, separated from the mix by magnets, cleansed of paper or plastic and compacted into bales. "The steel is sold back into global steelmaking applications," says Jason Carpenter - to a steelworks in India, say, to be made into a car component, a car body, a fridge or steel for construction. Other markets include Pakistan, Spain, Turkey and the US.
Upside: AMG recovers all the tin coating from cans and uses it again.
Glass bottles
Travels 22 miles
Destination: Harlow, Essex
Glass is kept separate in three colours (green, brown and clear) and sent to O-I in Harlow. It is broken into pieces and put in a furnace to turn it back into glass. Brown, green and clear bottles are made on site, then sent to drinks manufacturers.
Upside: The purest form of recycling: old bottles made into new bottles.
