What happens to your recycling

Sorting your recycling

After your glass, can and plastic recycling is collected, it's taken to the sorting facility in Leyland. 

Your recycling goes to a sorting cabin where staff pick out the large items that shouldn't be there. These items can damage our machinery. Then it's sorted by machines to separate the recyclables by type.

A magnet picks up steel cans as the recycling passes over it. The recycling is then bounced over a series of metal screens. The glass is smashed into lots of small pieces that fall between the gaps, removing the broken glass. Then optical sorters separate the plastics by type.

We use an an eddy current separator to sort out the aluminium cans, because aluminium is not magnetic. Fast spinning magnets give the aluminium a temporary magnetic field which is repelled by another magnet which forces the can off the conveyor belt.

Now all the recyclables have been separated they are dropped into individual hoppers. Once there is enough of each material in a hopper, the material goes to market to be recycled. See the section about reprocessing to find out how it is made into raw materials.