How Green Can You Go latest

9:00am Saturday 11th October 2008

WHAT happens to all our rubbish after it leaves our bins, black boxes and household recycling centres?

In the latest of our monthly features following a west Wiltshire family as they learn to lead a more eco-friendly lifestyle, Charley Morgan joined them on a visit to Hills Waste and Recycling Centre near Calne, which deals with the rubbish we throw away every day.

THE newspaper you are holding could quite possibly have been made from an issue of the Wiltshire Times & Chippenham News from just three weeks ago.

Paper recycling in Wiltshire is now such a quick and efficient process that the turnaround time from a paper being placed in a black box and being reused can be a timescale of between seven days and three weeks.

But at the Hills Recycling Centre in Lower Compton near Calne, they don’t just deal with paper, they manage all the rubbish we put in our recycling bins in Wiltshire every week.

It’s a massive task when you think each person in the county generates on average one tonne of waste a year.

The Gregory family, from Westbury, are taking part in our How Green Can You Go? challenge to lead a more eco-friendly lifestyle and were at the centre to learn more about what happens to their recycling waste.

Cliff Carter, recycling promotions manager at Hills, told them: “The amount of money it costs each of us from our council tax to deal with the waste we generate is about 50p a week.

“What we need to get through to people is that the waste belongs to you – we just manage it.”

Mr Carter says we all need to remember the mantra of ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ so that we start by minimising the amount of waste we generate, then reuse whatever waste we can and lastly recycle it when reusing is not an option.

Paper accounts for 1,700 tonnes of the 3,500 tonnes of waste the recycling centre deals with every month.

The company recycles everything from steel and aluminium cans, glass, plastic bottles, cardboard, wood, fridges and freezers and really, almost anything else you can think of.

It’s a slick operation at the centre – the waste comes in and is sorted by hand on a conveyor belt before being piled up and compressed into bales to be sent off around the country and processed into a useable commodity.

Cardboard can be made into furniture, plastic bottles into fleeces, carpets and other plastic goods or turned into fuel and glass is used for aggregate on building sites, sand on golf courses or is made into more glass.

Outside, there are piles of decomposing compost, piles of wood ready to be chipped and shredded, pluas Wiltshire’s shamefully large landfill site.

The landfill hole has been carefully constructed with a drainage system and gas pipes so the water and methane that comes out of the rotting pile can be cleaned and reused.

Mr Carter said: “Every time we create a landfill site we have engineers who design it so we can manage it in the most environmentally friendly way.

Carolyn Gregory, 43, and her husband Simon, 44, looked suitably impressed.

Mr Gregory said: “People don’t realise how much rubbish they create, but when you see it all piled up it really brings it home.”