Today I was one of two councillors to visit AmeyCespa’s waste handling facility at Waterbeach. We spent a very interesting couple of hours learning what happens to all the waste – recyclable and non-recyclable – after it leaves our homes. We saw the green bin waste before and after it has been processed; the blue bin waste being split, mechanically and then manually, into the different forms of recoverable material; and the black bag waste being sifted for recyclable material and then readied for landfill.

The cleaner and less contaminated the material in our rubbish, the better quality the material recovered from it – so it’s really useful if we can wash cans before putting them in the blue bins, for example. Recyclable items can be recovered from black bag waste, but they’ll almost certainly be more contaminated and of less value than those which have been put in our blue bins.

The worst contaminants of blue bin waste are dirty nappies and – really! – dead pets.  Not nice for the staff who have to manually pick out non-recyclable material from the waste stream at the end of the process.

East Cambridgeshire’s recycling rate has shot up enormously since we’ve had the wheelie bins – where we were lagging seriously behind other parts of the county, we’re now not far behind.