Waste King, the specialist collections, clearance and recycling company, is helping its customers to be even ‘greener’ by helping them take steps to maximise the amount of waste materials they can recycle. This involves Waste King in supplying customers with special containers for their waste materials.

One of Waste King’s special containers.

Waste King’s managing director, Glenn Currie explained: “These containers are useful for customers who have problems with recycling such things as waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), plasterboard, hazardous waste and so on. Once the customers have put waste materials into their container, a Waste King team of Environment Agency-licensed staff arrives to sort, clear and then dispose of all the items. It’s cleaner as far as the environment is concerned, neater for the customer and, frankly, easier for Waste King to sort, segregate and dispose of the waste.”

A key claim of Waste King’s is that it guarantees to recycle 85 per cent of all the waste – whatever it is – that it collects. In reality, the figure is now well over 90 per cent – mainly thanks to Waste King’s meticulous waste segregation policy.

“After collecting the waste materials, we bring them to our site,” Currie continued. “There, we separate it – by hand or machinery. If possible, we recycle the materials there and then but, if we don’t have the necessary facilities to recycle them – for example, in the case of such things as plastic – we put them in a large container.

“This container is sent to the local waste transfer station,” he continued. “The station staff there have a clean waste stream system which results in a 99.54% recycling rate. Most of the waste is separated by hand and all of the waste is placed on a conveyor belt. On this picking line there are 30 men, each of whom is looking for a particular type of waste. The conveyor belt has magnets to help these ‘pickers’ and, once they’ve ‘picked’ an item from the belt, it‘s placed in a shoot for bailing and recycling.

“It’s a low profile but also a highly challenging and important job,” he said. “These teams do a great job – and they deserve a great deal of praise for the great work they do in helping to reduce the effects of waste on our environment.”

Waste King’s operations director, Andy Cattigan, commented: “It’s important to get to know the environment-related issues in your area – and that comes from interacting with people. They could be customers, members of local clubs, societies, faith groups and so on. Our customers have told us that they could recycle a great deal more of their waste materials if they had these containers – so we’re delighted to be able to supply them.”

Comment: Waste King’s highly commendable business ethos is to send the minimum amount of whatever it collects to landfill. It aims to reduce long term pollution to a minimum and thus help protect the environment for current and future generations.