Going Green: What happens to your rubbish after it’s collected?
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The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. Now it's time for this. Going Green. On the Clare Byrne Show.
With Repack. Repack members. Repackaging the future and valuing resources. Find out more on repack.ie.
So you arrive home in the evening and your bin has been collected. Do you ever give it a second thought? So let's ask the question, what happens to your rubbish once it leaves your house? Conor Walsh is here, Secretary of the Irish Waste Management Association. Conor, you're very welcome. Thank you for being here. So what will we start with? Will we start with the recycling bin perhaps first and then we'll go to the rest of it? So what happens to that stuff?
Yeah, thanks, Clare. Thanks for having us on again. Look, I think it's only fair when we ask people to sort waste at home that we try and give them a little bit of feedback as to what happens to it, because it kind of helps people to understand why it's so important to sort waste at home. So just starting with the recycling bin, the dry recycling. So In the old days, we would have had handpickers, you know, people on lines picking out various materials for recycling.
What happens to your rubbish after it leaves your house?
Nowadays, it's very automated, very high levels of technology being used. I mean, we still have the handpickers, but the handpickers are mostly just getting stuff ready for the machinery, you know, and picking out contaminants, stuff that just shouldn't be there at all. And there's plenty of that at times. So, you know, we have things like magnets that will pull out the metals and then we have robots, would you believe? So it's not that common now, but it's becoming more common. So AI technology and robots. So the robot arms can tell what something is and they can really quickly go and suction cups on it. They can just pull things off. So robots are being used.
So they're taking things like soft plastic away from cardboard.
Yeah. I mean, an example, I suppose, at the moment in Dublin is Tetra Pak has been pulled out by robots. Milk cartons. Yeah, the milk Tetra Pak stuff. Yes, exactly. And juice and that. And that is sponsored by the company who put that stuff on the market. So that is good that they're taking it back. You want it separate from the paper because it is recyclable, but there are layers in it and paper mills don't generally like it. So it goes to a special mill where they separate out the layers and they get the fibre, recycle the fibre from it. And the one that's very common now is optical separators. So this is where a light, they shine a light on the material and depending on how it's reflected or refracted, there's a jet of air comes in.
So the jet of air will blow it left, right, forward. It'll blow it in a different direction depending on material. on the polymer of what it is you know whether it's a one type of plastic or another type of plastic or paper yeah oh yeah it's very very commonly used um you know we also have a separate things by size and shape and and that kind of thing as well so um we you know we end up with with uh with some really good materials coming out of it and i'd just like to give you a good example actually of of one material that's recycled here in ireland and that's It's the HDP. So the milk, the plastic milk bottles that people will be familiar with. So there's a company in County Tyrone called Stratroy Dairies and they supply these bottles.
They supply milk to a lot of the supermarkets all over the island of Ireland. So those milk bottles then come back through these sorting plants and they can be sent back to that facility because they have a recycling plant right there. They have their own sorting plant there.
Do they only take their own or do they take all brands?
No. From all over Ireland, UK, wherever they can get it from, because they want they want tens of thousands of tons of this stuff, you know, but they can they put it through a process there. And it's quite difficult because you still have you have milk in the pores and they have to squeeze the milk out of the pores and that kind of thing.
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