ONCE your recycling is picked up from the boxes you’ve left on the kerb, sorted into the trucks and dropped off at the depot, that’s it isn’t it?

It’s neatly bundled up and sent away to be made into new bottles, or plastic chairs or even fleece jackets, and cardboard boxes, right?

Well, no. Very much not.

After my morning with Crew 9 on kerbside collection I was shown around Swindon Borough Council’s recycling depot at Waterside Park in Cheney Manor by the council’s waste warden Cristian Starmer and Sean Magee from Public Power Solutions company to see what happens there.

And, basically, all that’s collected is sorted again. And again. and again.

Why?

Sean said: “We sell what we recycle to be used again. But it needs to be a clean and as high quality as possible. It has to have a very low rate of contamination, less than one per cent. You don’t want to ship it across to India or the Far East and then have it rejected and have to bear the costs of bringing it all back again.”

Gesturing at a huge pile of packing cardboard - the sort of corrugated card household goods come in, Sean said: “If we just got brown cardboard then it could all go off - but we get all sorts mixed in with it, other card - but we also get a lot of boxes with the polystyrene that gets packed around your TV in with it.”

While the recycling depot is just a big shed, inside it’s an Aladdin’s Cave of, well, all sorts of stuff.

In one corner is a skipful of taps taken from thrown-away kitchen units; the stainless steel sinks and drainer units are stacked nearby. Another skip is full of motors from vacuum cleaners, over here is a stack of pots and pans.

Dominating the middle is the can separator. All the aluminium and steel cans that have been collected need separating- so they are all sent up a conveyor belt and run under a huge magnet. The steel cans are picked up by the magnet and sent one way, the aluminium aren’t and go into another pile.

Sean said: “We’re trying to get it all as separated as possible - it makes a huge difference to whether we can send it on.”

The aluminium cans are crushed and baled into cubes and sent on. Sean added: “They’ll come back as more cans, or whatever, and if people keep recycling their cans, they’ll just keep coming round and being re-used again and again.”

Sorting my magnet sounds easy - but one of the less pleasant jobs must be sorting through the mixed pile by hand.

It’s a hug mountain of all sorts of material - but plastic bags are prominent and staff are picking through it by hand - gloved hand - to pull out recyclable material.

Cristian said: “We want to recycle as much material as possible. It’s for the good of the environment and the people of Swindon.

“We don’t want people to put recycling in the general waste bin, if it goes in your green bin, and its clean and separated it’s a much better resource we can use and sell.”