I toured London’s busiest recycling centre

From ambiguous recycling symbols to the lack of infrastructure to deal with soft plastics and the rise in vapes and used nappies entering recycling centres, the UK still has a very long way to go with dealing with its recycling problem – and the answer is not sending it abroad.

I’m wearing a hi-vis vest, hardhat and ear defenders and not only do I look rubbish, I am looking at it too; I watched some of the 350 tonnes of recycling that goes through one of London’s biggest recycling centres every single day. It sounds – and looks – like a lot, but as a nation we recycle less than half (44.1 per cent) of our waste, and 80 per cent of us admit that we’re also rubbish at knowing what we should actually be recycling, and how. But it’s not all our fault.

Each day, 300 trucks bring recycling from two million residents – roughly a quarter of London’s population – to this sorting location in south London. That equates to 120,000 tonnes per year of recycling, some terrifying finds and the smell of the capital’s badly washed food containers.

I’m inside the material recycling facility (MRF) of Southwark’s Veolia recycling centre, where everything that’s collected gets sorted. It’s a vast maze of conveyor belts, which reach tens of metres high. They’re seemingly going every which way, appearing to defy gravity with steep inclines. The whole place has a dystopian Willy Wonka-without-the-chocolate feel to it. It’s sweltering, with a continual loud chugging of huge machinery, and a claggy stench to the air of soggy cardboard and stale food.

With me is Tim Duret, director of sustainable technology at Veolia UK. “We live in a society where it’s cheaper to pollute than it is to recycle,” he tells me. While things are better than they used to be (the UK recycled just 10 per cent of its waste in 2000), and centres like this one are designed to sort through what we do now recycle, the majority of households is still unclear on how to recycle effectively.

In the capital, 54 per cent of people live in flats – there’s not space for each flat to have separate bins outside shared front doors, so recycling is collected mixed in one bag. Plus, no single recycling centre in the country is able to deal with soft/flexible plastics. No wonder things are in a mess.

When the contents of the emptied recycling bags reach the first conveyor belt in the MRF, workers standing either side of the wide belt grab obvious items that shouldn’t be there. I see one person pull out a black bag of soil and large roots, and so the list of non-recyclable items begins.

And there are bigger and far more dangerous items lurking. Next to the belt are wheelie bins full of what the team call hazardous items. One is overflowing with misshapen metal saucepans, but what’s more worrying is the box of large rescued gas canisters that sits on the floor.

Walking around on metal staircases, in between machinery and beside fast-moving conveyor belts, Mr Duret tells me that vapes are becoming a huge contamination issue, just as I see one on a smaller belt surrounded by tins and cans.

Aside from these little gadgets that release plastic, electronic and hazardous chemical waste into the environment and can cause fire and health and safety risks at processing sites, nappies – one of the biggest contributors to waste globally – are frequently found in recycling centres.

I’m shocked to discover that shredded paper can’t be recycled – it’s so small it flies off conveyor belts, and while grease on takeaway food boxes is OK, packaging can’t be recycled if there’s lots of food debris. One of the top contaminators though is drinking glasses and glass cooking bowls. They can’t be recycled with glass wine bottles, because of the difference in melting temperatures.

I see a mangled pineapple and a sweet potato on the conveyor belts, and after spending a couple of minutes here, it’s obvious there’s an inordinate amount of work to be done on communicating what’s recyclable, with contamination “cost[ing] council taxpayers about £2 per year just in north London,” says North London Waste Authority (NLWA) chair, Cllr Clyde Loakes.

Much of what I learned is no doubt a hard pill to swallow for many of us, who think we’re doing the right thing by attempting to recycle as much as possible, known as wishcycling.

According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, (Wrap), 84 per cent of UK households are unintentionally contaminating their recycling bins by including items they think, hope or wish, can be recycled. The report adds people aged 55-plus recycle the most successfully, and it’s Gen Z who are the most confused.

Although Mr Duret is very keen not to put the blame on consumers, and I agree – it’s not our fault, it is confusing. This shouldn’t discourage people from recycling, and he is adamant the machines and processes catch the unwanted items.

Recycle Now, which is part of Wrap, has an incredibly intuitive and useful tool, the Recycling Locator. Select the item you’re unsure about, enter your postcode and it will tell you if you can recycle it at home, and if not, where you can take it.

What to do with your recycling

• Gas canisters: Bottles used for items such as SodaStreams can be taken back to Robert Dyas to be refilled and sold again. Each return gets you a half-priced new canister.

• Vapes: Consider swapping to a refillable vape, but for disposable vapes, remove the battery first and recycle at supermarkets. Then follow the advice from recycleyourelectricals.org to find a local recycling point.

• Nappies: Due to their mixed plastics and absorbent materials, they’re near impossible to recycle and there’s no nationwide collection. NLWA offers a nappy voucher scheme for north Londoners worth £70 to purchase and test real nappies.

• Toiletries and cosmetics: Boots’ Scan2Recycle scheme takes hard-to-recycle items such as toothpaste tubes and mascara tubes. Register and scan them online, once accepted, take five products to drop off bins and earn 600 Boots points.

• Blister packs: Take to participating Superdrug stores, which is part of the UK’s first collection scheme.

Some of the most complex issues in the chain of problems around recycling are the confusing symbols that are supposed to show us what can be recycled. They are unregulated, not audited, and there’s an enormous amount of them. To put this into perspective, research by NLWA found more than a third of people who’ve put nappies in the recycling say it’s because the outer packaging has a recycling symbol. This is the “green dot” symbol, the most ambiguous of them all. Instantly recognisable for its intertwined green arrows in a circle, it looks like it means “I’m recyclable”, which is what I (and I’m sure most people) took it to mean. It actually means the manufacturer has made a financial contribution to a recycling scheme.

Recycle Now lists 16 symbols on its site, and the easiest to understand are the on-pack recycling label (OPRL) symbols, which simply say “do recycle” or “don’t recycle”. Mr Duret says, “It’s crucial to have a mandatory, audited and binary system for recycling labels so consumers have simple, clear messaging about what can and cannot be recycled from their homes.”

In the US, California has taken a tough stance, and has passed a bill that “prohibits the use of symbols of other claims that suggest recyclability”, says Sian Sutherland, co-founder of A Plastic Planet and PlasticFree, an organisation that works collaboratively with various stakeholders to reduce global plastic waste, and is something she’d like to see adopted in the UK. “The word recyclable should be banned,” says Ms Sutherland. “We shouldn’t call something recyclable when there is no responsibility from the brand to ensure that it actually gets recycled.”

There’s also an elephant in the room – that’s made of soft plastic. This material – which is seen as even less valuable – isn’t collected in kerbside bags, though the government plans to do this by 2027. It’s seen as the last bastion of the plastic issue to be properly tackled, and worse yet, “it accounts for 60 per cent of all plastic waste in the UK”, says Ms Sutherland.

Supermarkets collect soft plastics, but Tesco announced last year that it turns these into black bin liners. “You don’t get more single-use than a black bin liner,” Ms Sutherland adds.

It’s not just soft plastics that cause issues, as more than 40 per cent of all plastic made is used for packaging. Even though much of this is thicker plastic, such as drinks bottles, it can only be recycled a couple of times as the material is being “down-cycled” and its quality reduces, unlike aluminium which can be recycled almost infinitely. This is why there needs to be bigger incentives for take-back schemes, and big companies need to take more responsibility for what they create, instead of the onus being on the consumer to deal with it. The government announced a drinks bottles and cans take-back scheme in 2018, which has been delayed again and again, and is now set to start in 2025, seven years late.

That’s not all. “The government must also stop delaying Extended Producer Responsibility and make recycling collections consistent across the UK,” Cllr Loakes says. This means manufacturers pay for the “full net cost” of the product’s life, including how it’s recycled.

The government has brought in a plastic packaging tax (PPT), which came into force in April 2022. This taxes anything using less than just 30 per cent of recycled plastic in it, but it’s still well below what we should be aiming for. “If we want to aim for a circular economy, we should not be satisfied with 20 or 30 per cent recycled content, we need to aim for at least 70-80 per cent,” says Mr Duret.

Back at the conveyer belts, I learn about the huge magnets, lasers and air jets that are used to separate waste, and the fact that these machines are supposed to be 95 per cent accurate at sorting and detecting the different materials. Infrared lights help identify items, and puffs of air push denser items off belts into another sorting area, while the magnets pick out metal. It’s impressive, but despite the tech, the manpower and those of us who are diligently putting out our recycling bins each week, the reality is we just have too much waste.

Councils and recycling centres can’t cope with the sheer amount. This, combined with the expense of sending waste to landfills, is why the UK is still exporting 60 per cent of our waste abroad. Until 2018, most went to China, while now it goes to Turkey and Malaysia.

The word recycling has practically become a byword for binning. The phrase “reduce, reuse and recycle” has shrunk down to just “recycle”, which is arguably the easiest of the three to do; we keep buying the same amount, don’t repair something or prolong its life, and instead essentially put it in a bin (albeit a recycling one) for someone else to deal with. Holding manufacturers and the government to account, committing to understanding what we’re consuming and how to recycle it and buying less aren’t sexy solutions, but they are less rubbish than the alternative.