Kerbside Cardboard is back

Great news for Oswestry residents, the much awaited kerbside collection of cardboard is being relaunched. In the next couple of weeks residents will be issued with a 75 litre blue sack in which to store and recycle any paper or cardboard waste,  ready for collection at kerbside along with their normal recyclables. Your collection days will stay the same as it has always been.

In addition to this, you will also now be asked to recycle even more with no need to sort plastic, cans and glass, it can all go into your boxes mixed up, just make sure it’s clean, to avoid contamination.

I had responsibility for waste at Shropshire Council while these changes were being planned. kerbside cardboard collection stopped some time ago when a crazy EU ruling meant that cardboard could no longer be recycled into compost due to a toxin in the inks used during printing.

The council’s contractor Veolia recently opened  a new facility just off the M54, this facility is known as a MRF or Materials recovery facility, its function is to separate all your cans, glass and plastics using high tech solutions. Once separated it will be sent in different directions to be recycled and reused.

The cardboard that is collected will be taken to a paper mill and recycled into new packaging and paper products.

Finally anything that cannot easily be recycled, goes in your normal waste bin, which goes to the Shrewsbury energy from waste plant, which currently powers over 10,000 homes in the area. The ash residue is even recycled into aggregates for road building.

A new fleet of lorries is also now collecting our waste, these have been redesigned, to minimise journey time, whilst maximising the amounts collected. The routes of these lorries have also been looked at to improve efficiency.

These solutions has been proven to drive up recycling rates across the country, Shropshire currently recycles over 50% of its waste, that’s a whopping 78,000 tonnes, virtually nothing goes into landfill these days, which is great news for our environment. I hope that by making it easier to recycle, Oswestry in particular will embrace the opportunity and we will see recycling rates soar.