Where your recycling goes to

We use different collection trucks to pick up your recycling - they are not the same trucks which we use to collect your rubbish.

Here are the key stages describing what happens to your recycling:

1. Once the recycling trucks have picked up your recycling, it all goes straight to the Western Riverside Waste Authority site at Smugglers Way in Wandsworth. It then goes on to a materials recycling centre, like a vast warehouse, in Kent.

2. All your mixed recyclables arrive at the recycling centre in Kent and go in to a huge drum - a bit like a giant washing machine! As it rotates, smaller, heavier items fall through the gaps, leaving mostly paper and card in the drum.

3. Everything then moves along conveyor belts to a three-stream production line: one for paper, one for removing paper and card from other waste, and the third for separating cans, glass and plastic bottles.

4. Mechanical separators sort the waste even more using rollers and a shaking process to separate the materials by size, weight and shape. Magnets and magnetic fields are used to pick out steel and aluminium cans. There's some sorting by hand, but the recycling centre will soon be installing cameras to optically sort different types of paper and plastic.

5. The sorted rubbish then drops off the conveyor belts into large collection bays to be baled and taken away to be made in to a range of useful products. For instance, glass is turned into sand, and paper and card into tissue paper, newsprint and other stationery and packaging. Plastic bottles are made into a variety of products, from underground piping to fleece jackets! Cans and aerosols become new steel or aluminium products of all types.

The centre can process around 100,000 tonnes of materials a year and currently recycles an impressive 96 per cent of all of the waste that arrives there.

For more information on recycling in Lambeth call 020 7926 9000 or email recycling@lambeth.gov.uk