I’m in one of London’s biggest recycling centres,
Veolia recycling centre in South London.
And this, is where all of your recycling ends up.
Veolia handles the waste from more than two million Londoners.
Every single hour, it processes 14 tonnes of recyclable stuff that we throw away.
And we’re here to bust some of the most common recycling myths.
We get a lot of metal items
because tin cans are allowed.
One of the most common things that people seem to like to put in is frying pans and cooking equipment.
Even computer hard disks and circuit boards, we do recycle these but they will break this process.
There’s a name for this:
And it slows everything down, and runs the risk of contaminating other recycling.
We’ve got 21 different recycling labels widely used in the UK alone,
and some of them really don’t mean what you think.
The Green Dot, for instance, that just means that whoever made the item
has put some cash towards recycling in Europe.
The Mobius Loop, on the other hand, indicates that an object is capable of being recycled.
But it doesn’t mean that it’ll be accepted at all recycling collection points.
So one of the myths is about how much you need to clean materials.
You don't need to put them in the washing machine, you don't need to use loads of soap and water,
but you need to make sure there's no food, no milk, no residues on the plastic
so that it doesn't contaminate the paper.
These are disc screens.
They sort recycling according to size and weight.
Big, flat items, like pieces of cardboard, bobble over the top of the machine
and smaller stuff falls between the gaps.
Then a smaller set of disc screens sorts out large and light pieces of plastic,
like water bottles, from smaller items.
There are over 40,000 different kinds of plastic, all of them designed for different purposes.
But this makes for a recycling nightmare.
And also, a lot of confusion.
What do you do when packaging has more than one type of plastic?
Like plastic bottles and their lids.
With plastic bottles, keep the lid on.
If the lids not kept on, it'll fall through to the bottom and go into residue.
If it's left on, we can recycle it.
So if you've got a tray with a piece of film on top, peel away the film, make sure the tray is nice and clean.
And then the solid plastic trays can be recycled at most facilities.
And those little widgets in Guinness cans?
With cans, we don't expect you to cut them open and remove any plastics that might be inside.
That’ll be done later in the process, just make sure all your aluminium cans go in the recycling.
Among all the plastic, cans and computer chips there’s some pretty high tech machinery here.
This is an eddy separator.
It uses a powerful magnetic field to fish out metals that don’t contain iron.
The magnetic field is so intense that it can even separate out the smallest particles of metal,
silver and gold, which are also the most valuable.
This machine is called Big Jim.
It’s a near infrared sorter.
The machine filters out all the desired material and anything else carries on over to the next machine.
But before anything gets to these machines, it’s sorted by human hands.
Here we've got the paper line, and these guys are making sure that there's
no cans, no plastic bags, no bits of other materials that we don't want in the paper.
Very occasionally we get dangerous items, like knives, guns, ammunitions.
Everyone is tooled up to spot them
and that makes sure we get really nice pure materials coming down these lines.
And then we get to the end of the process, the bailing hall.
So we've done a lot of work with the machines to make sure that this is pure material,
above 99% cardboard, above 99% paper.
That goes off to a paper mill where it's all pulped up,
made back into new packaging, made back into cardboard, made into tissues.
Plastics, which we send off to be processed into pellets, to be blown back into milk bottles
and metals which will be made back into bicycles, cars, tin cans.
You might feel like you’re being a good person when you chuck that cereal box in your recycling box,
and you’d be right, but recycling isn’t just a good deed, it’s big business.
The global recycling industry was worth £161 billion in 2017, and it’s only projected to keep going up.
We do two million tonnes of material every year.
Some of it goes out to Asia. Some of it goes to Europe. Some of it stays in the UK.
And we call it the circular economy because we're putting materials back round in a loop.