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Where your rubbish actually goes

Disposing of things · 6 minute read

There's a widespread suspicion that sorting is pointless and everything goes to the same place. That isn't true, but the reality is more complicated than the bin colours suggest.

What happens after collection

General waste goes to a transfer station and then to landfill, though some material is recovered en route where facilities have sorting capability. Mixed recycling goes to a materials recovery facility, where it's separated mechanically and manually into commodity streams. Organics go to composting or anaerobic digestion.

Material recovered from recycling is sold as a commodity — baled cardboard, aluminium, steel, glass cullet, plastic flake. That means recovery rates depend partly on market conditions, not only on sorting quality.

What genuinely gets recycled well

Metals are the standout. Steel and aluminium are recycled indefinitely with no loss of quality and have strong, stable markets — an aluminium can genuinely can return as another can. Paper and cardboard recover well. Glass recovers well when collected separately, less well when mixed with other recycling because it shatters and contaminates paper.

What recovers poorly

Plastics are the difficult category. Rigid containers of the common types have real recycling pathways. Mixed, coloured, multi-layer and soft plastics are much harder, and a portion of collected plastic does end up as residual. This isn't an argument against sorting — it's an argument for buying less packaging in the first place.

The bulky waste picture

This is where individual decisions matter most, because the material is large and the recovery pathways are genuinely different:

• Mattresses — around 75 to 90 percent recoverable by weight when they reach a recycler, and almost entirely wasted when they don't.
• Whitegoods — largely steel, with high recovery through scrap channels.
• Timber furniture — recoverable as chip or fuel if separated from upholstery.
• Upholstered furniture — the hardest category, and mostly landfilled.
• E-waste — high recovery of metals when it reaches a proper recycler.
• Concrete and brick — crushed into road base at very high recovery rates.

Why sorting at the source matters most

Once materials are mixed and compacted, separating them becomes uneconomic. A load of clean scrap metal has value; the same metal buried in mixed waste has none. This is the whole argument for keeping separate piles during a cleanout — it's not tidiness, it's the difference between recovery and landfill.

What you can reasonably do

Keep contamination out of the recycling bin. Separate metal, timber, green waste and e-waste during any cleanout. Donate what's genuinely usable and don't donate what isn't. Ask whoever removes your waste where it goes — the answer tells you a lot about the operator.