Why Do Some Recycling Trucks Empty General Waste and Recycling Together?

Commercial Recycling Process | Podcast Ep. 61 Don’t Be A Waster

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Hello, and welcome to another edition of Recycle: Don’t Be A Waster, which is, of course, one of the leading recycling podcasts in Australia and internationally, thankfully.

So, in today’s podcast, we’re going to cover basically, I suppose, it’s a question or a complaint even that someone made to us recently.

And as you probably know, at Waster, we provide waste and recycling to small companies, and I suppose because we do this podcast, because of our business ethos, we pride ourselves on recycling, being honest, doing what it says on the tin, to quote the old advert, and providing not greenwashing, but being accurate in what we sell, accurate in how we describe things.

And, yeah, so I suppose we had a question recently from a customer who… Well, not a question. They actually sent through a cancellation to us because they had seen with their own eyes a garbage truck go on site and empty a general waste, a red bin, and then immediately emptied a yellow commingled recycling bin into the same truck.

And so obviously they thought this meant that it was greenwashing and we were bluffing, and that recycling was all not accurate. It wasn’t truthful, and that we were just dumping it all in landfill anyway.

So I suppose we want to go through in this podcast. Honestly then, that’s not what we want to hear, and we want as a company, and we want to, I suppose, put people’s minds at rest that, yes, we do recycle stuff.

Commercial Recycling Process: When Can This Actually Happen?

So I suppose firstly, this is unusual. This does not happen very often, but sometimes it does happen.

There are scenarios where it happens when recycling is not available.

And this is when… This was not the scenario in this case, but it does happen when, fundamentally, a recycling facility is closed or not accessible.

And this can happen when there was, if you remember a couple of years ago, there was a fire in Melbourne in some of the recycling plants, and the commingled recycling facilities weren’t available.

So, of course, this can happen from time to time.

In other scenarios, this can happen if trucks are broken down, if there’s a shortage of trucks.

I’m talking here around the edge scenarios, the very unusual cases when it’s just a logistics issue, and that can happen one time out of 100 when there’s no one else to empty the service and, just to get rid of the customer’s waste, they will take it as general waste.

And, of course, in that scenario, it does go to landfill.

But that is a very small percentage for the reasons that we’ll go through.

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Why It Doesn’t Make Commercial Sense to Send Recycling to Landfill

So I suppose what’s happening is if a garbage company or a recycling company was actually dumping recyclable materials at landfill, that would be fundamentally commercially insane, just even from a selfish cash perspective because recycling is much more cash effective, or cheaper, than landfilling due to the landfill levy and also the value that is in many recycling products.

For example, in Sydney or Melbourne, if you wanted to dump at landfill, you would have to pay a gate rate to get into the facility and dump it, which would probably be around about $300 per tonne.

So you would be in a very quick loss-making situation.

So in this podcast, we’ll go through, I suppose, discuss this topic in more depth.

The first thing is collection is only part of the process.

So that is the only part that people see on site, and then from there it enters the truck and it goes somewhere else.

Commercial Recycling Process: Understanding Dry Waste and Wet Waste

In the waste business, we separate waste generally into two categories: dry and wet waste.

And wet waste, or putrescible waste, is fundamentally stuff that contains food waste or green waste or something that can rot away and deteriorate.

Whereas dry waste will be, like in many ways, it’s an extended version of what could be in your commingled.

So it could be items such as cardboard, office paper, plastic packaging, drink bottles, aluminium cans, shrink wrap, and pallets.

Obviously lots of this can be recycled if it’s done properly.

So obviously cardboard should be going into a cardboard bin.

Plastic packaging, drink bottles, aluminium cans, they should be going into a commingled bin, and there are services available for shrink wrap if it’s in significant quantities.

But obviously that doesn’t always happen, and general waste is often intermingled with items that are recyclable.

Food waste is a different category because, A, it smells, B, it gets onto everything, and C, it’s generally not recyclable or separable in most facilities.

That’s in 2026.

There are facilities where you can recycle some food waste, but that makes things much more difficult.

What Happens to the Waste?

So what happens with the waste?

So I suppose you think about a commingled bin, which is the yellow bin, and that is, if you’re used to it at your house or in your business pickups, you don’t bag it, you just put it straight into the bin.

And the reason for that is that it has to be separated when it gets to the facility.

So that sort of waste is bottles, cans, containers, et cetera, that go to what is called a MRF, or a Materials Recovery Facility.

If you think of dry general waste, that is sort of like a commingled bin on steroids or exaggerated.

So it has generally some of those components and also other things that are not easily recyclable or easily separable.

And so that dry general waste often contains a certain percentage of things that are commingled waste and then a certain percentage of things that usually are included in general waste.

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How Commercial Waste Is Processed After Collection

So when it goes into the truck, all commercial collections in Australia are pretty much run with a commercial focus, i.e. to make profits.

And so it is in the company’s logistical and operational best interest to separate any waste they can and recycle that and get a fee from a recycler, and then minimise what is general waste, and with that general waste, minimise it as much as possible, and then dispose of it at landfill with the full awareness that when you go to landfill, you will pay a gate rate, which is in Metro Sydney.

It’s now… And we’re looking here, the landfill levy alone is one hundred and eighty dollars per tonne.

But then there’s also fees for the actual use of the facility.

So let’s assume around three hundred and twenty or so dollars per tonne.

So clearly it’s in anyone’s interest to reduce the amount of waste that is going to landfill, and people do that by recycling it.

Commercial Recycling Process: Why Some Recyclable Materials Are Worth More Than Others

So if we think about what goes into commingled, and we’ve covered this ad nauseam, I suppose, on some of our podcasts, some items are much easier to recycle than others, and the value in some items is clearly more realisable.

First of all, it’s higher, and secondly, it’s more realisable than some other items.

So clearly cardboard.

Look, the Visy empire, one of the richest families in Australia, was built fundamentally on cardboard, and that’s an internationally traded material.

So companies will try to strip that out as much as possible.

And of course aluminium, which goes into cans, again, I think we’ve covered in some podcasts that Australia uses circa ten percent of all its electricity usage just to produce aluminium from bauxite.

So it’s clearly in our interest to recycle aluminium cans, et cetera.

And I think everyone’s used to that from being at school and collecting them.

And then obviously certain plastics can be recycled as well.

Commercial Recycling Process: What Happens Inside a Materials Recovery Facility?

So the way people do that is when it is mixed, or commingled, or general dry waste, it can go to what’s called a MRF, which is an acronym, or a three-letter abbreviation, that means Materials Recovery Facility.

And this is sort of a facility that is about as big as a football pitch, with a lot of technology that looks like it’s out of a Wallace & Gromit movie, where it’s almost strange science fiction-style trommels and pathways and elevators, et cetera, where material is dumped in one end, and then it’s separated using a series of pretty much mechanical methodologies to separate it out into materials that could be more easily recyclable.

So generally it comes in and it’s dumped on a conveyor belt.

People with very protective gloves will try to separate out items beforehand that they can see with their eyes as it moves past.

And then it will go through a whole series of probably ingenious separation methods.

Trommel Screens, Ballistic Separators and Magnets

So the first are what’s called trommel screens, which are large rotating drums that separate materials by size.

It will then go into more screens which separate out flat paper and cardboard from bottles and containers.

And then it goes into what’s called ballistic separators, which isn’t as exciting as it sounds, but fundamentally it relies on movement and gravity and the fact that different sizes and shapes and weights of materials move differently when falling.

And so with that methodology, you can separate out flat materials, rolling containers or heavy objects.

After that, they go through magnets, and the magnets obviously separate out metals, and steel in particular.

And then you have other things such as eddy current separators, which use magnetic fields to eject aluminium cans and other non-ferrous, i.e. non-steel, metals.

Optical Sorters and Air Classifiers

Then this is probably the part that’s less likely, or less widely implemented in 2026, and certainly not in all facilities, are optical sorters.

They use infrared cameras to identify different plastics in a very short space of time, much quicker than a human can, and then they use air jets to separate out PET plastic, HDPE, polypropylene and clear plastics.

Admittedly, that is less likely to occur than some of the things we’ve mentioned previously.

And then you have air classifiers, which use controlled airflow to separate light materials like paper and plastic film from heavier items.

Obviously people are watching this the whole way through the process.

They’re using very protective gloves because obviously there’s broken glass.

There could be anything in this stuff.

Commercial Recycling Process: How Recycling Reduces Disposal Costs

And with that you can get separation percentages up to above fifty percent, certainly from dry, high-quality general waste.

And then you can reduce the cost of disposing of it from, first of all, let’s assume three hundred dollars per tonne.

You get that down to a net one hundred and fifty dollars per tonne that enters the facility.

And then in many cases you’ll get money back for the actual recyclable materials.

So you can on-sell the cardboard, you can on-sell aluminium, and to some extent, depending on the plastics, you might be able to on-sell some of that.

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Why Some Companies Collect General Waste and Recycling Together

So the takeaway here is that, in certain instances, companies do collect bins on certain runs.

If it’s dry general waste and if it’s commingled, they may put it into the same truck and it will be separated at a facility.

There are not many of the facilities that do this.

We utilise a couple.

In Sydney, there’s a company called Doyle Brothers in the Inner West, and they received multiple government grants to build a facility that does this.

And they use it also to produce what’s called alternative fuel so that some of this very high calorific plastic waste can be burned to produce high-intensity, long-burning fuel for places such as cement kilns and other industrial purposes.

And this is more efficient, obviously, than dumping that at landfill or purchasing other carbon fuels such as coal or gas.

So the net benefit to the environment is significant.

Commercial Recycling Process: Why General Waste Is Usually Collected Separately

The important thing to remember here is that in most cases, general waste is picked up separately.

But sometimes, and I think actually we will see more and more of this over time as these facilities…

Look, we’re seeing, I suppose, in councils, we’re often seeing more bins that we’re being pressured into separating our waste into on the street.

But, in another way, we’re seeing, especially as AI comes in, especially as barcodes and other technological ways of separating materials improve…

Like, you see it even at the supermarket.

Anyone who remembers when the automatic checkouts began, they didn’t automatically detect if you put a red onion versus a carrot versus some limes on the checkout.

Now a lot of them will detect that automatically.

And that is also happening in the world of recycling.

Commercial Recycling Process: The Future of Recycling Technology

So I expect what will happen is, in the future, we’ll probably put everything in one bin.

Everything will get taken away to the one facility.

It will be separated out.

Look, probably we’ll keep cardboard separate because keeping it dry makes it much more efficient.

But I think that’s what we’ll probably see.

We’ll probably see a reduced number of bin services.

Certainly dry general waste and commingled, I think over time, will become the same thing.

And that will mean fewer trucks on the road, fewer bins missed, less emissions, and reduced traffic in metro regions.

So I think that’s a good thing.

Why Greenwashing Doesn’t Make Commercial Sense

I think we’re not trying to greenwash stuff.

There are instances when people do the wrong thing.

There are instances when people try to cover a problem, that is to say a broken-down truck, and they prioritise helping out a customer and not leaving bins stacking up in their area.

So they might just absorb the cost and do it that way.

But that generally is a very short-term thing because, over the long term, if you are charging more for general waste than you are for commingled, and you’re dumping commingled at a general waste facility, then you’re clearly losing money.

So that doesn’t make much sense for anyone or any operator who wants to be in the game long term.

Commercial Recycling Process: Learn More About Materials Recovery Facilities

So I think it’s interesting.

We’ll share on the blog some videos of these Materials Recovery Facilities.

I know that some of them are open for visits from school groups and other council groups.

And they are pretty interesting.

In some cases they might smell a bit, but they certainly are interesting, and it’s nice to see how the whole system works.

So, yeah, we’ll leave it there today.

And I will wish you all a nice week ahead.

And remember:

Recycle, don’t be a Waster.