This feature relates to the Dispatches programme Britain's Rubbish.
On Dispatches: Britain's Rubbish, we have lifted the lid on Britain's bin crisis, following the trail of confusion in the kitchens of Manchester to the hugely varied strategies on what to do with our waste across the UK.
We met people who received instructions from the council after putting the 'wrong sort of plastic' in their plastic recycling container, the woman who had her wheelie confiscated when officials found it away from where it should've been and visited the street where a new bin system resulted in weeks of rubbish piled up adjacent to family homes.
At Fleetwood landfill site, there is little you can't find there - sanitary products, nappies, a double matress, and ironically, a viciously-compacted wheelie bin crowns the heap.
Seemingly, every few minutes a huge articulated lorry backs into the site and disgorges its cargo of Britain's most unwanted. Bulldozers scrape it around, before a giant compactor with spiked wheels squashes it into the ground. The staff do a convincing job of covering our cast-offs with soil and vegetation, leaving this part of Lancashire with gently rolling hills and pine trees presumably all growing out of supermarket carriers and baked bean tins.
Every year we create some 44 million tonnes of rubbish. Now, if that isn't a problem in itself we have a more pressing worry - within seven years the space in our existing landfills will have disappeared.
Part of the government solution is for us to recycle more, but Dispatches has heard evidence that some of the recycling produced by some of our councils can be of such poor quality that some of it ends up being landfilled. To test the theory we obtained a bale of paper from a municipal waste stream. Weighing a tonne, it is compressed and bound with steel ribbon.
Armed with a flat-bed lorry, gloves and some bolt cutters I pulled the bale apart and found plastic, tin, glass... 'non-target material' the industry calls it. and putting this through a printing press will result in broken equipment. The bale had come via a plant called a 'materials recovery facility', which allows the council to collect all our recyclables (paper, plastic, glass, aluminium) together and then separate them mechanically.
It is a process that is popular with councils as it allows them to collect large quantities from the householder and spend the minimum amount of time at the roadside. However, few doubt that collecting the materials individually at the kerbside results in reduced contamination.
Contamination means more rubbish heading to the Fleetwood landfill. A strong easterly made the scent more tolerable, but stumbling through plastic bags, kids toys and aluminium cans - all things that could be recycled - left me with one thought, Britain can't go on like this.
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