Environment & Recycling

Glass

With Landfill Tax increasing year by year, businesses are looking to reduce their waste management costs and minimise resources. Gilmour and Deans professional services can help you maximise your recycling targets and minimise your costs.

Glass can be recycled over and over again, enhancing the benefits of recycling in the long term. Furthermore, scope for the use of recycled glass is incredibly diverse. Recycled glass can be used in areas such as aggregates, manufacture of bricks, sports turf, fibreglass insulation and even water filtration.

Recycled glass provides a cheaper alternative, without compromising on quality, so much so, that recycled glass based products have been found to be of higher quality than many original products!

Cardboard

Our lives are full of cardboard, it comes as packaging for nearly everything we buy.
From food to consumer goods cardboard is clearly here to stay. But the good news is that it is a recyclable material, and it is not one of the worst culprits in our collection of man-made materials that clog up our lives, and ultimately, the ground, after we bury our rubbish.

The UK alone produces over 8 million tons of cardboard for packaging every year, which amounts to about 140 large cardboard boxes for everyone in the country, per year. Cardboard is usually the largest single constituent of municipal solid waste worldwide.
Cardboard is made from cellulose fibres that are created from wood pulp. To reverse this process, for the purpose of recycling, the cardboard is soaked and agitated, to release the fibres which can then be pulped. This process can be repeated up to 5 times before these fibres eventually shorten, and then disintegrate also, cardboard, in its shredded form, can be used for animal bedding, home insulation, either in the attic or between the walls. It is also being used in the green marketplace for biodegradable coffins.

Finally, cardboard is a good component to use in the developing area of waste to energy: creating fuels and power from waste products. It releases twice as much heat per pound of waste, compared to other sources, doesn't release toxic poisons, and its only by-product is ash.

Plastics

At first glance plastic is a wonderful invention. It can be made in any size, any shape and any colour we want, and is perfect for storing any number of materials and liquids, ranging from water to pesticides. Plastic is also very cheap to make, and requires little resources to do so.
But, how can we effectively dispose of it, particularly now that we have so much of it?

A Short History of Plastic

Plastic has only been part of our world since the 1830's, when experiments with rubber and sulphur created vulcanized rubber. Charles Goodyear, of the tyre company bearing his name, was responsible for this. This experimentation continued with the addition of other chemicals, and cellulose and rayon were produced. Bakelite, said to be the first real form of plastic, was created through this experimental process, in the first decade of the 20th Century, and humankind has never looked back.
The development of plastics really got underway intensely in the 1950's, and our consumption of the stuff, meaning our use of rather than our eating of it, currently stands at a 2000% leap since then, with an annual increase of about 4% on top of that. However, the disposal of plastic is hazardous – as solid waste it produces carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulphur dioxide – leaching into the soil.

Recycling Plastic, What Happens

There are 7 types of recyclable plastic. PET (polyethylene terephthalate) with a triangular symbol is the most common, and this is generally used for bottled soft drinks and water, cooking oil bottles and some oven-ready food containers. Once the plastic has been collected, it is sorted according to its polymer type and colour, washed and cut down into smaller, more manageable pieces. The pieces are again sorted during a flotation process (where the heavier, unrecycleable pieces sink), and then the remainder is dried and melted. This is then filtered to remove possible contaminates, then either squeezed into strands or chipped into pellets.

At Gilmour and Dean, we take our responsibility to the environment very serious. That is why we work very closely with our recycling partners, to ensure that any waste is handled and disposed of in a correct and professional manner. Our customers can also be rest assured that our recycling partners are fully Accredited and compliant to recycling regulations.