Recycling from street litter bins is ‘mixed with the general waste’ as company admits it is often too ‘heavily contaminated’ to be salvaged

Rubbish placed in recycling bins in Westminster is regularly not recycled, the company responsible for the city’s waste collection has admitted.

Items collected from the recycling section of the street bins in Westminster are in fact mixed together with normal waste in the same bags, sources say.

Pictures showed that recyclables which include paper, cardboard and plastic bottles are also thrown in together with other litter found on pavements when picked up by street cleaners and placed in wheelbarrows.

A former worker for Veolia, which handles street cleansing and rubbish collection on behalf of Westminster Council, called the recycling bins a ‘PR stunt’ and said that the public were being ‘hoodwinked’ into believing their waste was being disposed sustainably.

He confirmed that employees are in fact encouraged to not bother separating waste in order to save time and are told to simply place it all together in the same bags.

Veolia admitted to Westminster Times that waste from street litter bins is often ‘so heavily contaminated’ that it cannot be recycled.

David, whose surname was supplied to WT, left Veolia last November. He told Westminster Times that street cleaning teams did not have enough recycle bags to separate waste properly.

Although all street litter bins have two sides, one for general waste and one for recycling bearing the words ‘recycle here, help the environment’, he confirmed both are actually emptied into the same bag.

He said: ‘All the rubbish from the two sides of the bin go in the same bin. Both bins will go straight into the barrow, they won’t change the bag. Because they have nowhere to drop them off.’

‘I’ve worked in many depots and I know what goes on. If you actually walk up to any sweeper they don’t even have any recycling bags on them. They don’t even have them in the depot. They don’t bring them out.’

In his experience, there are few designated recycle bins at the street cleaning deposit points dotted around the city, including on streets in the West End such as Poland Street in Soho and Great Portland Street.

He added he was ‘laughed at’ by bosses for trying to salvage recycling.

‘I was the only one recycling stuff, and people said to me “What are you doing that for?”. And I was bringing it back and they didn’t know where to put the stuff and it was like asking a question that we don’t really know about.

‘I even got told off one day for actually separating the recycling from the bin’, he added.

‘When they come round, you’ll only ever see the street sweepers with black sacks. Their drop off points is only for that rubbish. There’s no drop off points for recycling in Westminster. If you went up to a street cleaner and asked “Where do you take recycling?”, they wouldn’t know.’

At all collection points for street cleaning waste visited by Westminster Times, rubbish from street litter and bins was tied together in green bags bearing the words ‘street waste’.

None of the several street cleaning workers approached by WT denied that rubbish was thrown together.

In most locations, waste is stored in black containers resembling those where sand and grit are kept for poor weather conditions.

On its website, Veolia claims to recycle 21% of waste collected in Westminster. One of most visible signs of this is 1,500 pavement bins marked for recycling across the city, at which the public are asked to do their bit for the environment by separating their waste.

David said: ‘People are very careful with recycling and it’s an environmental and political issue.

‘It’s really hoodwinking the public. People would be horrified. People are particular because they think they’re saving the environment. They actually think they’re doing a good deed.

‘But it’s a PR stunt to make us look good.’

A spokesperson for Veolia confirmed that items that are ‘correctly sorted’ are recycled, but admitted that most rubbish from street litter bins is too contaminated to be sent to recycling facilities, and added that unrecycled waste is diverted for energy recovery.’

It added that street cleaners were ‘trained to assess the level of contamination to determine whether the material is of the required quality to recycle’.

‘We are grateful to those that always do the right thing with their recycling, but we continue to develop new strategies to make this even easier’, the spokesperson said.

‘In partnership with Westminster City Council, a new litter bin has recently been developed making it harder for passersby to throw waste in without checking whether it is recyclable or not.’

Westminster Council said street litter was recycled ‘wherever it is practical to do so’ but added that contamination was a ‘constant challenge’.

‘Contamination, when people dispose of general waste in the recycling section of a litter bin, is a constant challenge, and one which means sweepers sometimes need to dispose of recycling as waste to avoid a larger load being rejected by the recycling sorting plant’, a council spokesperson said.

They added: ‘In spite of the challenges, the council’s recycling rate increased by 3.7% during the last 12 months which was the biggest increase by any London borough and within the top ten most improved local authority recycling rates across the UK.’