Paper and Card - sent to a recovery facility where the various grades of paper and cardboard are sorted and sold on to paper mills for recycling.
Metals, Plastics and Cartons - sent to a recovery facility where the materials go through a series of conveyors with magnets, eddy-current separators, air blowers and manual sorters to separate out the different types of material. Each separate material type is then sold on to a reprocessor for recycling.
Food Waste - sent to an anaerobic digestion plant where it is turned into a liquid fertiliser and a compost-like digestate (which are both used by local farmers) and methane gas (which is burned to create electricity, which is fed back into the national grid).
Glass - sent to a sorting facility where state-of-the-art optical sort technology allows the different coloured fragments of glass to be colour sorted, cleaned and sent on to a local reprocessing facility to be melted down and made into new glass bottles.
Garden Waste – taken to our composting site at Riverside where it is processed into PAS 100 standard Discovery Compost. The process involves the garden waste being shredded, screened for contamination and then laid out in ‘windrows’, which are then left to turn into compost. The compost is tested for quality before being sold on to local residents and farmers.
Residual Waste – taken directly to the energy from waste facility in Dundee, where heavy metals are removed before the waste is incinerated with the resultant heat being used to generate energy, which is then fed back into the national grid.
You can find out more on our recycling pages: Recycle for Dundee