The great Christmas clean-up?

CHINA, IT SEEMS, doesn't want our wastepaper and cardboard any more. Well, that's not quite so. But, the paper mills in the Far East are no longer prepared to pay European brokers the prices they had become accustomed to.

So, as recycling depots across Europe wonder how long they can store thousands of tonnes of baled paper and cardboard, Irish householders are asking why part of the contents of their green bins was travelling so far anyway.

If paper and cardboard are being sent all the way to China, where are beer cans, bean tins and endless amounts of plastic wrapping going? And, does it make any sense to recycle stuff if it has to travel halfway round the world before it is turned into something else?

Tracing exactly what happens to the contents of your average green bin requires a trip to a recycling plant. In Ballymount, Dublin, is what David Jervis, operations manager of Panda waste services, describes as "the recycling Mecca of Ireland. All the big recycling operators are here".

Take the Ballymount-Cookstown exit off the M50 motorway and soon you'll see what he means. There, some of the country's largest private waste operators - Oxigen, Greyhound, Thorntons and Panda - occupy vast warehouses and yards. Large trucks are weighed in and out, dropping off waste materials from both domestic and commercial clients.

On a tour around the Panda recycling facility, the most striking thing I notice is how tidy everything looks. It is a most extraordinary experience to see how the contents of our green bins are tipped into a huge mound, which is then moved through a process that results in massive bales of separately graded paper, plastics and metals. These can then be described as commodities. The waste managers even use terms such as "ingots" - a word usually associated with gold - to describe the bales of aluminium.

Another surprising thing when you see the separation process is how quickly it is done. At Panda, for instance, once the contents of the green bin are offloaded, they are moved up a conveyor belt into a "picking room", where workers are designated to pull off newspapers and magazines or packaging and plastic film. Glass bottles are also pulled off right along the line (Panda is one of the few operators that allow glass in green bins).

The remaining waste passes through a magnet, which drops steel cans into bunkers. Then, the small amount that's left is put through an optical sorter with various settings that distinguish between weights of plastic and paper. The sorter blows paper and plastic in different directions and throws aluminium cans in another. Any remaining glass or other heavy objects fall down into another bin.

And, contrary to popular opinion, the amount of non-recyclables put in the green bin isn't very high. "We find that there's a residue of about 4-5 per cent," says Jervis. "These are mainly textiles - clothes, which we pass on to charities, and then some grass and organic matter and the odd bag of stuff like nappies at the bottom of the bin," he explains.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a vast amount of data on what is recycled in terms of different materials and what still goes to landfill. A quick look at these figures is a wake-up call to anyone who thinks that Irish people have become master recyclers. For instance, over one-third of glass and half of wood still ends up in landfill. Astonishingly, so does almost 60 per cent of paper and cardboard, almost 80 per cent of aluminium and 85 per cent of plastics.

'YOU'VE GOT TO remember that we started from a very low base of recycling in the 1990s," explains Brian Meaney, senior scientific officer at the EPA. "Our recycling rates are comparable to a lot of other countries and better than some. However, even though 22 per cent of all household waste was recycled in 2006, we still have a long way to go to the national target to divert 50 per cent of household waste from landfill by 2013," he says.

So, when you hear tonnes of squashed beer cans described as ingots of aluminium, and learn that empty cereal and pizza boxes are turned into Easter egg and toy boxes, it's a terrible waste, so to speak, that a huge percentage of such commodities is still buried in the ground.

Even if we do improve on our recycling rates of materials such as plastics, paper, and aluminium, how much sense does it make to send them halfway around the world to be recycled? Waste collectors are completely pragmatic about the destination of our recyclables. "We send them wherever we get the best prices for them," says Brian McCabe, general manger of Panda.

So, aluminium goes to a recycling business in Britain; steel cans are sent to scrap steel merchants in Britain (where they are melted down, rolled and resold); and glass goes to Glasco in Naas, Co Kildare, where it is turned into cullet and sent to Holland to be recycled as beer bottles.

And, yes, the vast bulk of paper and cardboard is sent to China. "The big paper mills are in China and Indonesia. All European countries trade into China. Anyway, it would cost more to ship it to France than to China," explains Eamon Whelan, facility manager at Panda.

ACCORDING TO WHELAN, up until 2005 40 per cent of the paper waste in Ireland was sent to the Smurfit paper mill in Clonskeagh, Dublin, and the other 60 per cent ended up in paper mills in the UK. "All of those paper mills are closed now," says Whelan.

So, recyclable paper and cardboard is sold to a broker, who ships it to Rotterdam and then on to Indonesia and China. The vast bulk of plastic also goes to China.

The fall in prices for recyclable paper and cardboard has caused concern to waste service operators in Ireland. "It has suddenly become difficult to move on materials - especially materials from the green bins," says Brian McCabe.

"In fact, the materials in the black bins are worth more than those in the green bins at the moment, when you consider that the organic materials can be used for composting," adds David Jervis.

The journeys taken by recycled waste at Panda are mirrored in the figures compiled by the EPA. For instance, 99 per cent of paper and cardboard is sent abroad (at least half of which went to Asia in 2006). Eighty-eight per cent of plastics are also sent abroad - at least one third of which goes to China. More than 85 per cent of all metals goes abroad, almost half of which goes to Spain and Portugal.

Rather than waiting for the Chinese to pay more for our wastepaper, cardboard and plastic, should we instead be developing markets closer to home for such recyclables? "This is desirable and an important step in this direction is the establishment of the market development programme for waste resources, which aims to promote more recycling in Ireland of materials recovered in this country," says Brian Meaney.

Ironically, the incinerators planned for Carronstown, Co Meath, and Ringsend in Dublin may also offer part of the solution. Unpalatable as it may be for many environmentalists, these incinerators will recover energy from the waste burned in them. "Some countries already include incineration in their recycling figures because the energy that is created in them is converted to steam to generate electricity," says Meaney.