Recycling tours fully booked

To mark national Recycle Week in September, re3 held guided tours of its Material Recycling Facility (MRF) in Reading to give local people unique insight into the recycling process.

Five tours were held with 75 people seeing first-hand how all the recyclable household waste generated across the Wokingham Borough, Bracknell Forest and Reading is sorted and then baled.

Last year, more than 24,000 tonnes of recyclable materials were processed at the MRF. It can sort 14 tonnes of recycling per hour using a combination of manual and automatic processes including magnets, conveyor belts and lasers. Once baled, it is sent to responsible and sustainable companies to recycle into new products.

The tours were fully booked. During their visits, people also picked up recycling tips for their kerbside black boxes and were introduced to re3’s new waste search tool – re3cyclopedia – a free app for smartphones, which can be downloaded from either the Apple or Google Play stores. (Please see re3’s re3cyclopedia advert on the opposite page for more information).

Re3 says it hopes to run the tours again next year.

Meet Kate Binslet and Jar Jar Clinks

Kate Binslet and Jar Jar Clinks are re3’s new wheeled ambassadors to encourage us all to recycle more glass, bottles and jars.

The two new glass recycling vehicles were named by the public thanks to a fun social media competition run by waste management partnership re3.

‘Kate’ and ‘Jar Jar’ are more efficient than the old models because they are fitted with the latest weighing equipment allowing re3 to empty bottle banks at the right time.

Each glass recycling vehicle empties an average of 150 bottle banks, can carry up to 12 tonnes of material and regularly collects some 30 tonnes of glass every day – that’s the equivalent of approximately 60,000 wine bottles.

It takes a million years for a single glass bottle to decompose naturally. This is why it is so crucial to recycle glass, and why bottle banks are put near shops, parks and leisure centres so people can deposit their glass while they’re already out and about running other errands.

As bottle bank glass is less likely to be contaminated and is colour

separated as it is put in, it can be recycled into far more valuable products instead of just highway construction. Also, bottle banks need fewer vehicle movements than kerbside collections.

Please do not put glass in your black kerbside recycling boxes or bins, because it will damage re3’s recycling machinery.

More information: www.re3.org.uk