Without the Teignbridge kerbside collection last year, 8,000 tonnes of paper, plastic, tin cans and glass would now be rotting in the Heathfield landfill site. But the new £450,000 bulking station in Brunel Road, Newton Abbot, has changed all that. It's where the contents of the green and black boxes are sorted before contractors take them away and turn them into a host of new products. 'They reckon it's just seven days between paper arriving here and being back on the shelf as newsprint,' said operations manager Steve Kew. Paper accounts for half the collected waste, with glass a close second. Steel, aluminium, plastics and woven materials make up the rest. The steel is used in raw steel production and the aluminium is used to make car parts. Glass is recycled and some finely crushed to make highway building blocks. The main use for plastics is drainage pipes, that and fleeces, recycling boxes and bins. Mr Kew explained why only the 'cloudy' plastic bottles are collected at the kerbside. 'Each polymer type has to be reprocessed individually, so although we could collect them all the cost of sorting them rules it out,' he said. 'The new plastic bottle banks can take any type of plastics, though, as those are bundled up together but sold on for a much lower price. The best thing to do with plastic bags is take them back to the supermarket.' Chris Brains, Teignbridge's waste management officer, said many plastics, particularly the type used to pack fruit and vegetables, had little or no recycling potential and government had done little to help. 'The main supermarkets are signed up to reduce their packaging, but it's a voluntary agreement and it's not got any teeth,' he said. 'It's a troublesome material and it's better to reduce than recycle.' Around 30 per cent of the district's population are ignoring the recycling scheme, a costly decision as soon Devon will be fined £150 for each tonne below its recycling target and the price borne by council tax payers. 'The most important thing is to communicate well with people and encourage and motivate them to take part in what we're doing,' said Mr Brains. 'We also need to iron out problems such as improving the service to places where many people live together and, perhaps, expand the range of what we collect, although that's when it starts to get expensive.'
