Recycling is becoming part of daily life. As Dartford Council rolls out its new box-it' scheme, SARA NELSON tracks the journey of old cans, bottles and jars from your doorstep through a complex sorting process ...

The next time you polish off a beer, before dropping it into your new box, spare a thought for the journey of splitting, separating, piercing and crushing which comprises the first part of the recycling process.

If you are a Dartford resident, you may well have already received your new recycling box, which are replacing the previous clear plastic bags.

The boxes, which hold plastic, paper, cans and glass, are collected once a week and the contents is taken to a specialist plant, known as a Material Recovery Facility (MRF).

It is at one of these plants in Greenwich which your empty beer cans, jam jars and milk cartons are sorted, spun, pulverised and smashed, before emerging in neat cubes of plastic, glass or paper at the other end of a long assembly line.

Greenwich MRF is an £8m partnership project between waste management firm Cleanaway and Greenwich Council.

Opened in February this year, the MRF is home to several innovative pieces of machinery, making it the most technologically advanced plant in the UK.

As one of the largest of its kind in the country, the plant receives recyclables from households in Greenwich, Dartford, Gravesham and Sevenoaks.

The process: Cleanaway vehicles start to collect the contents of recycling boxes in Dartford once a week from 7am onwards, before heading to the plant, in Nathan Way, Thamesmead.

The materials are then deposited onto the floor of the plant, where a collection vehicle shovels it up and drops it into a bag splitter, which tears open any bags using a series of teeth mounted on a revolving drum.

The material then travels to what looks like a gigantic washing machine drum, known as a trommel screen, which separates containers, paper and cardboard using different size holes.

From there, it is onto the sinister-sounding ballistic separator, where containers and paper are divided.

Steel cans and other ferrous metals are removed by a powerful magnet and an eddy-current separator removes aluminium cans.

The various materials continue to make their journey around the plant via a complex series of conveyor belts, staff assembly lines and machinery, all controlled by the brains of the operation, a computer located in a cabin in the centre of the plant.

Watching the piles of milk cartons, newspapers and cans glide around the plant on conveyor belts, it is hard to imagine how precise the separation process can really be.

Cleanaway sales and marketing manager Lorraine Graham admits: "It's not an exact science but in this plant we only throw away two per cent of what comes in a 98 per cent success rate.

"We want to produce as little residue as possible and these figures are very encouraging.

"In essence, we are a sorting facility. The material is just separated here and then sold on, it is not treated."

Once the materials have been separated, they are wrapped and stacked in neat bales and are stored on the shop floor before being sold to commercial firms.

Most of the material is exported all over the world, with most of the plastics and paper sold abroad while steel and aluminium tend to be resold in the UK.

Dave Thomas, who is involved with Dartford Council's refuse and recycling collection, said: "The effort and commitment made by Cleanaway to sort and re-process material is outstanding."

WHAT THE FACILITY CAN DO

  • The plant can handle 75,000 tonnes of matter a year. It currently processes between 800 and 900 tonnes a week
  • The Dartford Council Box-it scheme brings in 120 tonnes a week the weight of a large adult blue whale.
  • The plant currently employs 45 people working two shifts between 7am and 11pm. A third shift has just been introduced with the intention for the plant to run 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday.
  • Residents have been known to attempt to recycle some odd things dead chickens, dirty nappies, rotting Hallowe'en pumpkins and gigantic teddy bears are just some of the stranger things which have ended up at the plant
  • The plant is home to one of the only two cascade systems in the world a hi-tech piece of technology which cleans newspaper products.