Some of that happens in the UK, but much of it – about half of all paper and cardboard, and two-thirds of plastics – will be loaded on to container ships to be sent to Europe or Asia for recycling. From there, the materials enter a labyrinthine network of brokers and traders. It starts with materials recovery facilities (MRFs) such as this one, which sort waste into its constituent parts. Everything you own will one day become the property of this, the waste industry, a £250bn global enterprise determined to extract every last penny of value from what remains. You drink a Coca-Cola, throw the bottle into the recycling, put the bins out on collection day and forget about it. From there, it will go – well, that is when it gets complicated. The waste stands stacked neatly in bales, ready to be loaded on to trucks.
“We’re seeing a significant rise in boxes, thanks to Amazon.” By the end of the line, the torrent has become a trickle. “Our main products are paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, mixed plastics, and wood,” says Smith, 40.
Along the belt, human workers pick and channel what is valuable (bottles, cardboard, aluminium cans) into sorting chutes. On the tipping floor, an excavator is grabbing clawfuls of trash from heaps and piling it into a spinning drum, which spreads it evenly across the conveyor. We are standing three storeys up on the green health-and-safety gangway, looking down the line. “We produce 200 to 300 tonnes a day,” says Jamie Smith, Green Recycling’s general manager, above the din. The line at Green Recycling handles up to 12 tonnes of waste an hour. A photograph of a smiling child on an adult’s shoulders. A crushed Tupperware container, the meal inside uneaten. Odd bits of junk catch the eye, conjuring little vignettes: a single discarded glove. A momentous river of garbage rolls down the conveyor: cardboard boxes, splintered skirting board, plastic bottles, crisp packets, DVD cases, printer cartridges, countless newspapers, including this one. A n alarm sounds, the blockage is cleared, and the line at Green Recycling in Maldon, Essex, rumbles back into life.