A load of rubbish? West Berkshire Council defends bin recycling

West Berkshire Council has scotched rumours that it is cutting corners with waste recycling.

It says it totally refutes the claims made on social media site Next Door that the council is "collecting all the recycling that residents carefully wash and separate, to blatantly pour it all into a mixed bin".

The thread goes on to say this "renders efforts to be more green and sustainable, completely futile".

The social media conversation has also accused the local contractor Veoila of reneging on its contract to ferry the recycling to a Southampton recycling centre.

But West Berkshire Council hotly denies this, saying: “We can categorically refute the theory that our contractor has reneged on a contract to send materials to a Southampton recycling centre.

“All our materials are initially sent to the council’s own facility at Padworth where they are baled and sorted where necessary before being transported to recycling plants. We are not aware of any contractual difficulties or an inability to move recycling materials on.

“We are grateful to West Berkshire residents for their commitment to recycling and reiterate the need to continue separating their recycling into the relevant containers and bags for collection as usual.”

The council explained that the trucks typically used to collect dry recycling - including plastic bottles, metal cans, glass bottles, paper and cardboard - from the kerbside in West Berkshire have different storage compartments.

This means that various materials can be collected separately to achieve a high quality of recycling material, which is more attractive to the market and can therefore be effectively recycled.

Occasionally, hired vehicles are temporarily brought in by the contractor to support the existing recycling fleet during times of high demand and increased volume of recycling being presented for collection by residents.

The hired vehicles do not have as many compartments but have a split-back design to enable collection of different waste streams at a time.

For example, paper and cardboard can go in one section, and plastic/tins/aerosols in the other compartment.

“The vehicles we use often carry designated wheelie bins on them for the crew to use so that they can empty pre-sorted recycling into them,” explained a spokesperson.

"The contents of the designated wheelie bin are then loaded into the correct compartments of the vehicle to ensure that recycling is not mixed. This reduces the amount of manual handling for the operatives and means they can collect from multiple houses before going back to the vehicle.

“The designated wheelie bins are usually green coloured and this can sometimes cause confusion among onlookers that they contain a garden/food waste bin even though that is not the case. Additionally, it may not be obvious to an onlooker that a vehicle has a split-back design because they look similar to a general waste vehicle.

“In the few instances where some dry recycling materials are collected together in one compartment due to limitations in vehicle design, they are mechanically sorted on arrival at the council’s materials recovery facility (MRF) located at Padworth near Reading.”