Where does your recycling and rubbish go?

Find out how the content from your recycling bags, boxes and bins is collected and where it's taken.

Mixed recycling

Everything from your clear recycling bags, doorstep recycling box, or communal mixed recycling bin is collected and taken to a materials recovery facility in Southwark.

At the facility, the recycling trucks tip the mixed recycling onto the floor of the facility for a visual inspection by site staff. If they spot the wrong thing in the recycling (also known as contamination), such as food or polystyrene, the recycling may be sent for incineration an energy-from-waste plant in south London instead.

The recycling is then loaded into the 'bag splicer' which splits the clear disposable recycling bags, so the contents can be recycled.

A variety of machinery such as rotating drums, wind sifters, magnets and infra-red sensors are used. along with some manual sorting.

All these processes sort the mixed recycling into various material streams. These various materials streams include: 

paper
cardboard
plastic bottles
glass bottles and jars
steel cans
aluminium cans

The separated materials are then baled and ready for distribution to recyclers. These can be glass and metal smelters and paper mills.

Textiles should not be placed in mixed household recycling as it damages the machinery.

Find out more information about how to recycle textiles in Westminster.

Micro recycling centres: separately collected recyclables

These recyclables include mixed paper and card, plastic bottles, glass bottles and jars, food tins and drinks cans.

You can watch animations of how the separated materials are recycled:

Recyclables are traded on the open market, with a preference for facilities in the UK, to manufactured into new products.

The table below shows the typical end-markets of the materials collected in Westminster and products they can be made into. These may vary depending on demand and quality.

Approximately 30,000 tonnes of material is collected from households and businesses for recycling and composting every year in our borough.

Material	% by weight (approx.)*	Typical destination	Typical end-product
Paper and cardboard	50%	UK (Kent), India	Newspaper, cardboard packaging
Glass bottles and jars	30%	UK (Yorkshire)	New glass bottles and jars, road surfacing
Steel cans	2%	UK (Wales)	Car parts, girders
Aluminium cans	2%	UK (Cheshire)	New drinks cans
Plastic	8%	UK (Dagenham)	New plastic bottles, piping, fleece
Food waste	8%	UK (Bedfordshire)	Fertiliser and soil improver

*The percentages are the approximate proportions of each material type of total household waste.

Electrical appliances

All waste electrical and electronic equipment must be collected separately from general rubbish to be reused or recycled.

Small domestic appliances

Any small domestic appliances that are collected from the small appliances on-street recycling bins and are taken to Sweeep Kuusakoski, Sittingbourne, Kent.

Large domestic appliances

Fridges and large domestic appliances are collected by the bulky waste service. Fridges are treated separately due to the hazardous CFC gases.

Each load is registered and inspected, its weight recorded at the weighbridge, so we know how many tonnes of recycling we have.

Appliances are tipped onto the floor for a visual inspection and for diggers to remove any stray fridges, non-ferrous items and hazardous items such as gas canisters. They are then input to the shredder.

Outputs from the shredder are dumped into 3 separate piles and processed further:

ferrous scrap is sent to Liverpool for bulking and shipping - the main export destinations are Spain, Turkey and the USA, with some exports further afield to India and Malaysia
non-ferrous scrap is further processed off-site to separate the different metals, with important export markets being Europe, India, China and Korea
CFC gases from fridges are contained and disposed of by incineration

Food waste

All food waste collected separately to be recycled is sent for processing in a plant in Hertfordshire, England, where it is used to produce biogas (which in turn is used to generate electricity and heat) and biofertilizer, which is used on local farmland. 

Household rubbish

Your household rubbish is sent to SELCHP, a waste-fired power station in Deptford. The waste is then burned to generate green power for around 50,000 London homes. Residual metals are extracted from the ash and the rest is used as an aggregate in road building.