Severn Waste
Severn Waste based in Worcestershire and Hereford, supply a service that the
recycling goes through on a conveyor belt whereby all the obvious unrecyclable
products are taken out, leaving the recyclables to go through the sorting process.
This divides them into flat paper, with magnets to removing metal cans; an eddy
current separator that work like magnets in reverse to reject aluminium cans. Plastics separated by an optical sorter, the rejected plastics then going through another
set of optical sorters to separate the different types of plastics, leaving only the glass
and jars (Severn Waste, 2015.) Some of the products are shipped out to local companies to create tissue, but most of the recycling is exporting out across Europe. Many
people are unaware of this process and when recycling how to do it properly.
Linking to primary research, interviewee Kate Stott, Education and Communication Officer at Severn Waste, Worcester (appendices 5) stating that; “There are a
couple of challenges there’s the laziness (.) definitely and umm (.) people that yeah
just can’t be bothered (.) they don’t see the benefit of it or umm they don’t understand that actually that does then go in a separate vehicle to a separate facility and
gets treated separately cause there’s still that kind of misconception that everything
still ends up in the same place anyway (.) umm but then there’s also eugh there’s
people that think they are doing the right thing so if there not sure they’ll put it in
the recycling because they think that it will then get recycled which obviously isn’t
always the case and actually that can cause more harm than good.” This again backs
up Severn Wastes knowledge of the issues still not covered in the West Midlands.
This facility now enables schools to go and visit the facilities giving a guided tour to
see first-hand how the process works and what impact they are having. The advantage to this idea is that it encourages students from an early age to get involved and
learn about how to recycle correctly, defining the meaning of why as consumers this
should be second nature. A disadvantage to this is how far will this knowledge go?
Are the parents of these children going to listen and interpret their child’s knowledge, or continue on with their daily routine? An opportunity here would be to
promote the facilities to the local community and create a destination for families to
visit, therefore getting the whole family involved.
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