Moray Council can now accept all PET 1, HPDE 2 and PP 5 plastics including pots, tubs and trays (yoghurt and margarine tubs; plastic drinks bottles with lids; bathroom and shower bottles; cleaning and disinfectant bottles; tablet and medicine bottles).
Plastics which can’t be recycled and should go into the green bin are marked PVC 3, LDPE 4, PS 6, or 7, and include materials like cling film; carrier bags; crisp packets; coffee pods; polystyrene soft foam; and plastic toys.
What really makes a difference is how clean the contents of the purple bin are, so please take a few moments to rinse plastics and cans to remove leftover food and drink before popping them in the recycling bin. This helps ensure the recycling isn’t contaminated.
We have all read horror stories of plastic waste being shipped out to less developed countries, simply off-loading the problem. However plastics and cans collected from households in Moray are processed by Moray Reach Out, a social enterprise which provides training opportunities for vulnerable adults from across Moray.
They are then collected by Wyllie Recycling and further processed at their brand-new facility in Perth. The first stage of this is to identify and remove any items of general waste as part of quality control, then the removal of any remaining metals, like tin cans, with industrial magnets and eddy-currents to ensure the highest purity of plastics.
Clean plastics are compressed into one tonne bales of clean high-quality plastics then separated, washed and flaked into pellets at UK re-processors to make new products like drinks bottles, fleeces, benches and toys.
