Dudley Council bosses have pledged to keep the environment as a key focus and are reminding residents that they can play their part by sorting recycling.

The practice of co-mingling, where households do not separate recycling, has been hitting the headlines recently for having a negative impact on the environment and council bosses have pledged to continue to collect separated waste only.  

In areas where mixed recycling is collected, it has to be sorted through a separation process, which takes a lot of time, costs more money to transport, contributes to additional pollution and can often cause cross contamination reducing the quality of the recycled items. Dudley Council collects sorted recycling to avoid this and it is only processed in the UK. Councillor Khurshid Ahmed, cabinet member for environment, said:

“As an authority we are passionate about protecting the environment and want to do all we can to encourage people to recycle as much as possible. Just a minute or two taken out of the day to do a simple task at home has huge benefits for the environment and helps to keep costs down for our tax payers too.”

Residents can recycle plastic bottles, tins, jam jar lids, aerosols, drinks and food cans in their green bag while glass bottles and jars are collected in black boxes. People are asked to recycle paper and card including newspapers, magazines, junk mail, telephone directories, cereal boxes, greeting cards, ready meal sleeves, cardboard egg boxes and brown corrugated cardboard in their blue bag.

The council does not collect lower grade plastics such as plastic trays for meat or fruit, plastic tubs for margarine and ice cream, yoghurt pots, flower pots, plastic film and plastic bags for recycling because they have much poorer outcomes. It also does not collect fruit and UHT cartons, polystyrene or plastic packaging, wallpaper or carrier bags.

Only three per cent of waste from Dudley borough goes to landfill. Household waste not sent for recycling is collected weekly for incineration, putting energy back onto the national grid.