RECOUP report estimates that over 120k tonnes of plastics are available for recycling from UK Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs).
Plastics resource efficiency and recycling charity, RECOUP, has released its 2023 Plastics Management and Recycling at Household Waste Recycling Centres in the UK report.
The report found that over 120,000 tonnes of rigid and hard plastics are disposed of at HWRCs in the UK annually but that little of it is recycled. This amounts to as much as £13mil of council and waste management company funds paying taxes and gate fees for disposal of this material, RECOUP says.
As part of the report, RECOUP has developed several recommendations and interventions that it says would help enable plastic disposed of at HWRCs to fit into circular economy models, as well as potential steps to build on this research further.
Plastics collected at HWRCs offer an opportunity to capture more previously unrecycled material as recycling targets continue to grow.
The recommendations include creating a robust dataset relating to material captured at HWRCs, improving the understanding of the journey of this material from collection to its final destination and identifying the requirements for greater investment in UK infrastructure to sort and reprocess traditionally “hard-to-recycle” plastics.
The final recommendation is to develop re-use infrastructure to remove items being disposed of as waste in instances where they can be recovered.
Tom McBeth, Policy & Infrastructure Projects Manager, commented: “Whilst known to be more difficult to process, of lower value and more highly contaminated than kerbside material, plastics collected at HWRCs offer an opportunity to capture more previously unrecycled material as recycling targets continue to grow.
“This, combined with increased demand for recycling and recyclate through various policies and legislation, means that there is a need for more materials to be captured and recycled, particularly domestically.”
