2-4-6-8, what do we incinerate?

Alice and myself were lucky enough to gain a ride to the recycling facility that handles the university waste together with a small team from the university estates and accommodation. We drove out on a gorgeously sunny day to be met by a bigger team from Changeworks, donned our protective wear and were ready for a tour of the facility.

We were amazed; both by the processes of the recycling centre, and the humans behind them. The dry recycling waste was poured onto a conveyor belt and step by step got more refined, with the help of a holed tumber pipe system that sorted it by size and magnets that removed first steel and then aluminium cans, until all that was left was separated piles of large cardboard, plastic bags, aluminium and steel cans, plastic bottles, waste paper, and non-recyclable materials. There was a lot of the last one, people are clearly are not using the system properly all across Edinburgh; but all of it got sorted out by the hard-working men staring at conveyor belts for hours at a time. None of the landfill waste went to landfill, either; it was sent to a waste-to-energy plant for incineration.

The facility was not an unpleasant space and the cubes of sorted recycling, ready for sale, were oddly satisfying. I wouldn't last there for a week. The worst things, we were told, were full ketchup bottles, which would spray ketchup on everything when they got under pressure; nappies, knives and needles.

At the end of the visit Alice and I realised we needed to get back to the drawing board. Given how well the waste was sorted at the facility, we couldn't imagine that a few coffee cups and paper towels in the wrong bin would make a big difference, and that was all the stickers were going to do; instead we'd need to get people thinking about the whole ordeal.