1. What can I put into your blue bags?
These bags are for most types of paper. You can put in: Newspapers, magazines, coloured paper, white paper, post-it notes, glossy paper, envelopes with windows in and we’re even cool about it if the odd staple sneaks its way in.
2. What can I put into your orange bags?
You can put drinks cans and plastic bottles in our orange sacks. We accept all plastic that is type 1 and 2, for example drinks bottles, milk bottles and washing up liquid bottles. All plastic comes with a little triangle symbol with a number inside on it. You can see the symbols and the most common products here:
Also you can download a poster for your office explaining which materials go in which the orange bags here:
3. What do I do with those stickers for cardboard recycling?
These are for slapping on bundles of cardboard boxes. We ask that you use one sticker per 5 boxes max. Try to flatten the boxes then tape them or stick them into a bundle and then label them with a Laundry sticker so that, once you’ve put it outside at your collection time, our drivers know that this carboard is Laundry cardboard and should be taken away and sent to a better place.
4. Why can’t we put all the recycling into one bag?
We have deliberately avoided co-mingled (or ‘all in one sack’) collections because they mean that the quality of paper collected ends up very poor and won’t be accepted for recycling back into high quality recycled white office paper. Although superficially it seems easier to put everything in one sack, smashed glass and food residue from cans and plastic bottles contaminates the contents, this results in a lower grade material which is not suitable to produce recycled office paper.
Lots of recycling bods have published articles about this:
packaging-online.com
If everyone starts to have their recycling collected all in one bag, then the amount of paper available for recycling back into good quality recycled white office paper is going to become less and less. This means that the price of recycled paper will go up. This is not a good thing.
BioRegional, the organisation that runs the Laundry project, is dedicated to providing local sustainable solutions to everyday problems. For this reason an effort is made to find locally available markets for the materials collected in the round, this way you don’t have plastics being shipped half-way-around the world to be recycled which means loads of emissions and difficulty in auditing where this collected waste ends up.
All our collections are run through a Materials Recycling Facility (that sorts everything thing out) to make sure that the cans are separated from the plastics and the high grade office paper is separated from the lower grades. This means much of the paper goes to M-Real in Kent, where it gets turned into 100% recycled paper which is then purchased back from the customer at a discount rate. The “Local-Paper Loop” uses 93% less energy than sourcing virgin paper from overseas.
We recycle 100% of what we collect from you. Anything less would be rubbish.
5. What are your cardboard bins for?
Check out a picture of the bin here - they’re about a metre high, and the bags fit perfectly inside. No more struggling to hold the bag open and put your paper in for you!
The price for a bin is £12 + VAT, and the delivery is £4.95, so would be £19.92 on its own, but you can save on postage and order as many stickers and bags as you like for the same courier fees - it’s in a van after all!
Also, as it is cardboard, when you no longer want it you can just recycle it!
6. What types of plastic can I recycle with The Laundry?
You can put types 1 and 2 plastics into our orange bags along with drinks cans and tins. You can tell what type a plastic container is by looking on the bottom for a small triangle with a number in it; if the number is a 1 or a 2 we can recycle it. This will include plastic milk bottles, water bottles and fizzy drinks bottles.
7. Why do you only takes types 1 (PET) and 2 (HDPE) plastics?
We only take types 1 and 2 because they are the ones offices are most likely to have and they are also the ones that we can recycle in this country; we are keen to keep all the waste we collect from you in the UK, otherwise recycling can end up having a negative effect environmentally (if lots of emissions are caused by transporting the materials overseas). Other types also produce a lower quality product when recycled and so there is no use for them in the manufacturing processes in this country.
In our orange plastic sacks you can put any packaging made out of types 1, PET (eg fizzy pop bottles) or 2, HDPE plastic (eg milk bottles). You can tell this by a little triangle symbol that appears on the packaging. You can also put aluminum drinks cans in the same orange sack. Lids are usually made from type 4 and so we can’t take them (some cheeky ones are type two so if you enjoy the finer details in life – go lid gazing). You can download a poster with the symbols on from our website:
http://www.thelaundry.biz/cans
8. What about post-it notes, eh?
We do accept post-it notes in the paper we collect from Laundry customers in blue sacks. This paper is then sorted at London Recycling’s yard in Canning Town to remove all the newspapers, magazines and poorer quality paper. The resulting make-up of the paper without these elements is called ‘Sorted Office Waste’ and it gets sent to M-real mill in Sittingbourne in Kent for making back into paper for use in offices.
The other paper termed ‘Mixed paper’ is also taken to the M-real mill in Kent then made into corrugated cardboard.
Recycling is so variable between countries and local areas because of what technology is used to process the recyclate into a new end product like paper or cardboard.
We do know that we can’t accept brochures or books that have glued spines because the glue causes problems with reprocessing, and also that paper sorted from commingled (or all-in-one-bag) recycling collections often gets rejected by paper recyclers because of problems with contamination, like shards of glass or food residues.
9. Where do all the materials you collect go?
Here is a table of end markets for everything we collect:
10. Is your recycling service confidential?
Once the bags are in our van they are treated with security in mind, the van is always minded and we take them to a depo’ that our collection partners own, which is manned in the day time and locked at night (with barbed wire round the top of the fence!).
The bit that we cannot control is what happens to your paper when it is on the street waiting for our guys to pick it up and chuck it in the truck. We therefore can’t guarantee confidentiality and therefore recommend that if anything is top secret, you shred it before putting it in the bag.
11. Why do you put all the bags into one dumper truck?It is true – but don’t worry, it’s the best solution in terms of picking up the most amount of Laundry possible whilst emitting as few nasty fumes from the truck as possible. Laundry is bulky especially the plastic. Once it gets back to the yard we tip it out and pull out the orange sacks and the cardboard. The tins get magneted out of the plastic and the paper goes along the picking line so that white can be separated out from the mixed. Even the plastic from the bags gets recycled. The white paper gets sent to a mill in Kent where it gets washed (like in a Laundry) and turned back into clean paper which you can buy from Osman the stationer. Here are our green bits: www.thelaundry.biz/greenbits
Our collection partners, London Recycling, are London’s longest running independent recycling company, uniquely they own their own yard so have complete control over what happens to the rubbish they collect. London Recycling the Laundry’s Daddy And here is more on the charity that runs the Laundry: BioRegional the Laundry’s mummyHope this all helps to put your mind at rest. (wow I really went to town).
12. What happens to the CDs after we post them to The Laundry CD recycling?
You can post CDs and DVDs to our collection partners London Recycling; the only cost is the stamp, bargain. You can also deliver them between office hours (9 til 5) Monday to Friday. No need to call ahead, just turn up and someone will be there. The stuff gets reprocessed for the plastic and made new stuff like office furniture. Address details here:
13. Why can’t you collect my recycling more than once a week?
At The Laundry we try to make our collection process have as little negative environmental impact as possible. So, by collecting from up to 300 of our customers on one day per week in a milk-round style route, we minimise unecessary legs of the journey between our recycling yard and you, our customers. This means less nasty poluting fumes to higher quanitites of recycling picked up. We feel it’s quite a reasonable length of time to ask you guys to store your sacks for. Please get in touch with us direct if you’d like to let us know.
14. Where does the money we pay for the sacks and stickers go?
The Laundry is a not for profit organisation, part of the environmental charity BioRegional. However, we do have to cover our costs, so this is where the money goes. We have to pay the drivers of our recycling trucks, pay to run the trucks, pay for staff members to sort the recycling and carry out administration, as well as other business and recycling related costs. We don’t want to rely on funding in order to collect your recycling, we want to prove that recycling for small businesses is financially viable, and go on providing a good, clean and easy to use service. We have kept our sack and sticker prices as low as possible, and they are competitive in comparison with council waste prices.
15. How can I recycle other materials that The Laundry can’t collect?
Glass: Unfortunately we don’t collect glass at the moment, but if you get in touch with our recycling partners London Recycling they might be able to help you. Their website is www.london-recycling.co.uk and their phone number is 020 7511 8000.
Vending cups: We don’t recycle vending cups I’m afraid, try our partners London Recycling. Their website is www.london-recycling.co.uk and their phone number is 020 7511 8000. Otherwise try Save a cup, www.save-a-cup.co.uk/. Perhaps you could switch to using glasses in your office- far more classy!
Fridges etc: Unfortunately we cannot take kitchen equipment. Check out DEFRA’s page on fridge recycling here, hopefully this will help. Apparently, there are rules under the new WEEE directives that say the people delivering the new fridge have to take the old one away, but this means that the price of a fridge will go up. This comes in to force in July. So all in all, it would seem it’s a bit of a grey area.
It might be worth getting in touch with AnyJunk, they can take any electrical kit away.
16. Why do you use bags made out of plastic instead of paper or starch?
We use plastic sacks because paper and starch would get wet if it rained and then there would be paper all over the street. Also you can put much more in terms of weight into a plastic bag meaning that you get better value for money. Finally all our bags are made from 100% recycled plastic and get recycled when we split them for sorting.
17. What’s my collection time?
Please check here for a list of streets that we collect from, it tells you which day and what time we pick up too. Back to FAQs
18. Do you collect glass as part of The Laundry recycling collections?
The Laundry collection scheme doesn’t include glass. We have found during customer surveys that there is a very small demand for glass collections from offices. There are several issues with collecting glass from the kerbside that could cause problems with the way The Laundry collections work. For example, glass is very heavy, so could not just be lifted by hand and would require a different kind of collection method, the vehicle would also need a separate glass compartment, because glass breaks into shards which could contaminate the other materials we collect (paper, cardboard, plastic and cans). Although we don’t collect glass at the moment, you could get in touch with our recycling partners London Recycling they might be able to help you. Their website is www.london-recycling.co.uk and their phone number is 020 7511 8000.