What a load of rubbish, well, no, actually raw materials for recycling.

WHEN a plastic bottle is thrown into a recycling bin in Cambridge, you may well think it is the end of its journey – but it is just the beginning.

That bottle is about to embark on a trip which could last thousands of miles and see it transformed into anything from a fleece jacket to guttering.

While this may not sound the most exhilarating of travels, as the strain on raw materials and the cost of mining them rises, recycling is arguably the future of preserving our planet and becomes more and more important each year. Household recycling rates are at an all-time high in England and edge up each year – for 2010-11 the average rate of household waste sent for reuse, recycling or composting was 41.2 per cent.

Cambridge sits proudly above the national average at 44 per cent (a 3 per cent rise on the previous year) but is still a way off the leader Rochford, with 66 per cent - although the city has seen a staggering increase in recycling over the past decade. In 2000 the household rate was only 11.3 per cent.

If there’s one thing which improved the city’s standing in the national tables in recent years, it was the introduction of the take-all blue recycling bins two years ago.

Bob the Bottle, who started his journey in Cambridge, clings to his mates ahead of being recycled

Introduced in response to residents’ calls for larger recycling containers and a wider range of items collected from the kerbside, they have helped the council collect more than 120,000 bottles more a month - up to 1,120,000 - and 87 tonnes more paper.

Despite the regular increases in recycling rates, Vicky Lacey, a recycling and waste officer at Cambridge City Council, thinks there is still a lot of work to be done to ensure the public does not think of it as “rubbish”.

And so, to highlight the value of those early-morning bin collections, I was tasked with following a two-litre cola bottle - which we christened ‘Bob’ - from the blue bin, to sorting in Peterborough, then up to Lancashire for processing. I could have gone as far afield as China tracking our friend Bob but decided Skelmersdale was far enough.

Bob set off from his blue bin alongside his plastic allies, newspapers, cartons, phone books, foil and glass to the sorting plant in Peterborough.

Hugh Morris and Bob before he runs the gauntlet

Here at Viridor, which is contracted to run the Peterborough City Council-owned site and take blue bin contents from Cambridge, Fenland and Huntingdonshire, Bob rode a wave of rubbish out of the lorry before being shovelled into a labyrinth of conveyor belts and sorting systems.

Some 15 tonnes an hour takes on the assault course of trommels, ballistic separators and remarkable intelligent UV light sorting machines. A host of 23 sorters also pick out any unwanted items - needles, nappies, knives and, once, a samurai sword.

A book could be written – and may well have been – on the trials and tribulations Bob endures as he makes his way through the machine, but in short the different products emerge in bales at the end.

On an average day, 100 bales of paper, 40 of plastic, 20 of cardboard, five of steel, 10 of landfill, and around 20 tonnes of glass. Bob was somewhere in a plastic bale.

Cambridge First reporter Hugh Morris sends Bob the bottle on his merry way to recycling heaven (Skelsmerdale)

And in that bale he would stay until he reached the Viridor plastic processing plant in Skelmersdale, just north of Liverpool.

One of only four such plants in the country, Skelmersdale recycles about 3,000 tonnes of plastic every month. The raw materials produced account for 8 per cent of the country’s output.

Again, a book could be written on the complex maze of space-age sorting which goes on inside the building. More so here than in Peterborough, as the plastic has to be sorted into PET (like Bob, for example) and HDPE (milk cartons, for example) as well as having stray metal and glass fished out.

Once the plastic is solely plastic it is washed and shredded to become either fine flakes or pellets, washed again and dried, before being packaged ready for sale and shipment. This is what recycling is all about. This is the product which can be sold for as much as £900 a tonne. This is what Bob would have wanted.

It only takes 25 Bobs to make an adult fleece. Or he could become a new bottle; or piping; or food containers. And in the process save hundreds of tonnes of waste from landfill.

“It’s all sellable. Nothing goes to landfill. We try our best not to throw anything away,” Ian Bowyer, a training officer who showed me Bob’s route, said proudly.

After watching this fantastic process and its incredible worth, it seems strange the message of recycling, although much more widespread and accepted now than 10 years ago, is still one which needs to be told every year.

“People think it is about throwing something away when really it is about reusing something,” Mrs Lacey told me.

“The local authority and the residents are suppliers of raw materials and the recyclers are just adding value to it by sorting and processing it into usable and sellable products. That’s the bit people don’t really think of.

“Most people know recycling is good but they don’t necessarily think about why – the use of fewer raw materials like oil, saving energy by not mining those materials.

“People think about how much energy and effort goes into recycling something but not compared with how much effort and energy went into making something from scratch.”

But at the same time, she said, the public is still coming to the council asking for more to be recycled in different ways. “Sometimes the public perception is ahead of what is actually achievable, sometimes it’s the other way round,” Mrs Lacey added.

There are still unavoidable limits to recycling – 44 per cent of household waste might be recycled, but that still leaves 54 per cent which cannot be.

This is where market forces come into play. Ideological recycling is all very well but if the value of the end product is no greater than the cost of processing the waste, there is no point in recycling it.

Victor Perez-Mares, communications officer at Viridor, said there must be a market for any end products to make recycling viable.

“We can’t collect something if we haven’t got an outlet for it. But that’s not coming from Viridor, that’s coming from the market,” he said. “The more we can put out, the better.”

But will recycling keep growing until there is nothing left to reuse?

“It’s difficult to predict at the moment as the economy is not in a great place,” said Mr Perez-Mares. “But more and more people are recycling across the world.

“The growth is certainly going to continue as countries try and reduce their carbon footprint and become more aware of the environmental and economic benefits.”

It is little surprise local authority recycling rates can be linked to the area’s demographics, and in that respect Cambridge fares well, although the council does have to deal with a large transient student population and a number of older buildings not suited for recycling provision.

Still, the city is in the top 35 per cent of authorities and Mrs Lacey assures me it is eyeing up the upper echelons, most importantly, in second place with 65 per cent, South Oxfordshire.

“We are doing really well but we could do more and part of that is making sure we are recycling the right thing and not the wrong thing,” she said.

“We, as a council, are here to try and serve our residents.”

As we chatted on our return journey home from Skelmersdale, the man in the seat next to us, obviously eavesdropping on our recycling discussion, interjected.

“If you look inside the blue bin and you think, ‘God, that’s what I create’, it does make you think and it actually has an effect on my purchasing decisions,” he said.