Pile of Green bag materials waiting to be sorted

Paper and card from the green box The breeze blocks in the wall are made from road sweepings!

If you’ve just moved into or you already live in a house in East Devon, you’ll have a green recycling bag.

The contents of this bag have a very special fate. Everything in this bag is taken to a huge machine called a “Materials Recycling Facility” (MRF) on the Greendale industrial estate near Woodbury. That’s where the waste and recycling company Suez, that runs our service, has their site for East Devon.

This machine has been up and running for several months now and has enabled the district council to make significant savings on the cost of the rubbish collection service. Here’s blow.

Recyclables have a value, but the less “contaminated” they are, the higher the value. The MRF sorts our recycling in such an accurate way that the bundles of recyclable stuff that come out of can be sold at a good price to companies that use recycled materials.

Into the green bag iat our back door go cans, tins, hard plastics like veg trays, meat trays, yoghurt pots, milk and juice bottles, tetra packs, metal and plastic lids. You can even put tin foil in the bag- it’s aluminium and is VERY recyclable. The MRF doesnt cope at all well with flimsy plastic like cling film or the plastic top of ready meals, so please put them in the wheelie.