What happens to the dental products, medicine blister packs, pens and soft plastics once you drop them off at the collection points in St Bees? It’s a good question, as there is concern over what happens to a lot of the plastic that is collected for recycling in the UK.

The first step of the journey is dropping the waste items off at the nearest official collector for each waste stream. No special journeys are made to do so though; the items are stored until a member of St Bees Green Future is going to Workington, Cockermouth or Carlisle. The official collectors then send them on to a material recovery facility run by either TerraCycle or Veolia.

TerraCycle offers free recycling programmes for items that aren’t collected by local councils; these tend to be mixed materials that are harder to recycle, such as toothpaste tubes, pens and snack packaging. The recycling schemes we take part in are free, as they are sponsored by manufacturers. Similarly, Superdrug has partnered with Veolia to recycle medicine blister packs.

The waste collected from TerraCycle’s schemes is sorted, washed and processed in the UK. Plastics are shredded, melted and turned into pellets, flakes or powder. These can then be used by manufacturers to produce containers, bins, watering cans, outdoor furniture, decking and surfaces, such as those you find on playgrounds. Metals are shredded and smelted into metal sheets and bars for further use.

The waste sent to Veolia’s facilities goes through a similar process and they guarantee 100% recycling after residues and contaminants are removed.