Friday 11-04-2025 - 14:35

 

 

Have you ever wondered where the bin van goes after it’s collected your kerbside bins? What happens to all that recycling and rubbish? 
 

 

In week 21, a green group headed to ECOTown at Lancashire Renewables (LR) in Leyton, Lancashire, to find out. The site takes in kerbside waste, both recycling and ‘black bag’. LR has two facilities in Thornton and Leyland, which are manned 365 days a year. Both sites can process over 5,000 tonnes of “black bag” waste per week, diverting 95% of this material away from landfill.
 
We travelled sustainably to the site by two trains and a bus, meeting Wheelie, their mascot, on arrival. The tour started learning about the site, some facts and figures about how much they process and how the site works, while walking on a large path above all the infrastructure.
 
Our first stop was seeing the materials recovery facility, which deals with all the kerbside recycling. We were met with the sight of the reject pile, which looked overwhelming at first, but we soon learnt this was tiny in comparison to everything else saved. We then got to see everything they do before that point, and the sheer about of waste that they deal with. Once the vans dump the recycling, the crane drivers drop waste carefully onto a hopper and then onto a large conveyor belt like a big grab game, where it begins its journey. We all got to have a go in crane seats, admittedly not controlling the claw, but to high-definition cameras so we could snoop at everything people had thrown away. It arrives at the sorting cabin, where the first line of defence picks out anything incompatible that shouldn’t be in the recycling. The weirdest thing ever delivered in the trucks was the body of a 16-foot python!

It all then goes through a long process of over-band magnets, glass smashing, optical separations and eddy current separators to separate the recyclables into different plastics, glass metals and cans. All the belts and machinery crisscrossing each other through the warehouse, that had to have taken a crazy game of teras to fit it all in. Once all separated and sorted, each material is baled, ready to be shipped off to the offtake market for recycling. 
 
The next stop was seeing the Waste Treatment process. When the black bin bags or residual waste enter the facility, it’s loaded into a shredder and then mechanically treated metals and a combustible product known as refuse-derived fuel in a series of magnets and large spinners with mesh sieves, so everything is separated by size.
 
The focus of their ECOTown is to highlight reducing waste, through education and reframing the waste hierarchy for a circular economy. We got a glimpse at the work they do with charities, saving all sorts of things from the rubbish heap like furniture and books and giving them a new life. 
 
We finished the tour, to see the beginnings of the new work being undertaken to take in household food waste as of April 2026. The project is introducing the mechanical biological treatment process which is currently undertaken at their Thornton site.
 
We made the journey back to Lancaster, having learnt a lot and with a new appreciation for how waste is processed. So, remember to rinse your recycling, sort it properly and limit your waste wherever possible. Oh, and also, please don’t recycle your pets!