In the bin? Yes! And then in the red skip outside? Also yes, but what about after that?
As a Silver Ecochurch, aiming for Gold, we are very aware that even if we minimise waste as much as possible, some will end up in the bin and needs really careful management.
So in March 2024 three of us took a tour at CSH Environmental (Colchester Skip Hire) to see how they fulfil their claim to divert over 99% of all waste from landfill!
The site, near Wormingford, is amazingly clean, litter free and quiet, built to contain sounds of machinery, capture and use all their own rainfall, and generate solar energy from the roof. There are high earth banks planted with wild flowers to screen the neighbours’ view.
This is what we learned from our tour guide:
CSH is a family business which employs over 100 local people. They take their responsibility as an environmental business and a good neighbour very seriously, as we discovered during the tour of the site.
Waste arrives from bins like ours, skips and huge container-size ‘Roll on roll off’ skips used for major demolition or industrial waste. Tankers also bring in material such as tons of sub-standard jam (yes really!) for recycling. Most waste is unsorted, so enters the vast factory for sorting in to the 44 categories that come out at the other end!
Sorting starts with huge JCB-like machines that gently rip bags & pick out big items such as boxes, pallets, drums or sheets of plastic. Smaller pieces are loaded onto an overhead sorting belt, high above the factory floor, where specialised ‘pickers’ swiftly remove each category as it passes them. Mountains of plastic film, metal, paper, bottles etc accumulate under each person, to be baled and sent on to the next stage of recycling.
A separate, brand new factory building, just one year old, handles construction waste via a mechanised conveyer belt. Starting with a magnetic screen for iron and steel, a vast rotating drum sieves small stones, soil, concrete fragments etc out of the mix, before the remains are separated in water, floating out wood and some plastic, leaving precious metals and other materials to sink. We learned that of all waste, plaster board is completely recyclable and is sent to Kent for crushing, separation and re-forming into new plasterboard!
Green waste and food are composted or sent for anaerobic digestion to make gas for energy at a local site. Wood is chipped for use as biofuel by a Frinton company who heat their greenhouses and generate electricity for export.
Plastics are, as we all know, really useful and widely seen as essential materials – but recycling is so difficult because of the contamination (food especially) and sorting issues. Plastics that are not recyclable are shipped to Sweden in monster-size bales, where they are incinerated on a massive scale for energy. This is the only viable way to deal with the quantity that CSH handles, and nowhere local can do it better.
We asked whether our waste could be better recycled if it were sorted, and the answer is ‘not really’ as the facility sorts it all. The next steps for CSH is to refine sorting of smaller items so even less is lost from the system.
Our church is classified as a business, so there is no free kerbside collection, and we pay CSH for our waste collection service. We pay by weight and frequency of collection – currently the red skip is emptied every 3 weeks, and if it contains heavy items we pay more!
We can all help the church by taking home items from church that go in kerbside collections (such as paper/card, washed plastic bottles, foil, food waste) to reduce the volume in our skip. Bags of office paper for recycling are too heavy and should not go in the red skip, but small quantities of cardboard are OK so long as boxes are flattened – to save space!
Please take heavy or bulky items such as furniture or building materials to the local tip (recycling centre).
If we all help reduce church waste the red skip can be emptied less often, saving the church money! Thank You!
See the website for even more on this topic! https://www.cshenvironmental.co.uk/recycling-centre/
