Poor quality UK recyclate

At a time when many recycling organisations in the UK are exporting plastics to China for reprocessing, at least one UK reprocessor, LINPAC in West Yorkshire, has to resort to importing plastics from abroad to reach its reprocessing capacity.

LINPAC is one of the UK's largest plastics reprocessors, handling 34,000 tonnes of waste plastic each year. However, BBC One's Inside Out discovered that the company imports 40 per cent of its plastic from Belgium and Holland.

LINPAC has to pursue a policy of importing because it only reprocesses high-quality rigid plastics, while many local authorities and recycling organisations in the UK collect lower-quality mixed plastics, including yoghurt pots and margarine tubs. LINPAC says the quality of commingled collections from UK kerbsides and bring sites is not good enough to use.

Bernard Chase, LINPAC Purchasing Manager, commented: "Quality has deteriorated because of the expediency of commingled collections and the ease with which this can be exported. I think we need a change of emphasis."

He added: " LINPAC would definitely prefer to champion recycling in the UK through the use of home-sourced dry recyclables. Unfortunately, the target-driven commingled method of collection that has come to dominate the UK recycling infrastructure does not provide the required quantity of quality-driven recycled material that can be obtained from source-segregated collections."