ANDREW Cook’s career is rubbish but he doesn’t mind a bit.

He is a waste contracts officer at Swindon Council’s household recycling centre at Waterside Park.

He and his colleagues on the busy site at the Cheney Manor Industrial Estate are in charge of keeping landfill to a minimum and recycling to its maximum.

Andrew holds a degree in geography, having found himself drawn to the environmental aspects of the subject, and spent a year working with an environmental charity in the New Forest.

He said: “I came to Swindon in 2003, and moved to work here from the old Barnfield site when Waterside Park opened in May of 2004.

The Barnfield site was half the size of this one.

“When Waterside Park opened, we were handling 20,000 tonnes of waste and recyclable material each year – now it’s 25,000 tonnes.”

Even when broken down into individual categories, the annual figures for recycling are mind-boggling.

For example, some 8,000 tonnes of garden waste, about half brought by residents and the rest collected kerbside, are sent to be turned into compost.

About 2,000 tonnes of building rubble are sent to a specialist firm to be crushed and used in projects such as road building.

Meanwhile surplus soil (about 500 tonnes a year) ends up in landscaping projects and about 10,000 tonnes of paper and card are sent away to paper mills all over the world to be recycled.

Scrap metal comes to the centre in the shape of everything from bicycles to washing machines – about 2,000 tonnes of it per year.

This is sent for reprocessing. Some 1,500 tonnes of electrical items also find their way to Waterside Park in an average year, and the staff sort it into rigid categories prior to further processing.

Fridges, for example, are subject to a raft of regulations when it comes to disposal, as they contain substances potentially harmful to the environment.

Miscellaneous items and substances include wood (which is reprocessed into everything from chipboard to fuel), engine oil (refined and used as heating fuel) and vehicles (sent to a specialist dismantler and eventually recycled).

According to Andrew, Swindon is recycling more of its refuse than ever before, although 10,000 tonnes a year still ends up as landfill.

Work to improve on this figure is constant, with the local authority seeking out ever more recycling partners.

Andrew added: “Much of the landfill is made up of black bag waste – household rubbish.

“Even that can contain recyclables such as bottles and cans, though, and these things could very easily be put into recycling boxes.”