Being honest, it takes lots of hard work to manage the waste we receive and dispose of it in the way we want to – which of course is recycling as much as possible and reducing what goes into landfill.

Commercial waste describes anything that is not hazardous. This can be a mix of plastics, wood, soil, glass, metal, cardboard and general household waste.

All waste (except non-recyclable inert waste) goes to our material recycling facility (MRF) at Pennington. NMSB offers various methods of disposing of waste, through our skips or fill-a-bags, muck away and direct tipping at many of our sites. To tip directly with us you must have a waste carriers licence, which can be applied for using the following link.

Waste Journeys

Our waste department completes three to four compliance checks per week, where they will follow a skip from start to finish to see what is in it and track the waste journey. This helps us to ensure that we are disposing of the waste in the best way possible.

Below we have detailed some of the material recycling journeys:

• Wood: Shredded – some turned into compost
• Green Waste: Shredded – turned into compost
• Soil: Screened – turned into 1A engineering fill (this goes back into our quarries to reinstate the land and is great for biodiversity, especially for planting wild meadows and grass.)
• Concrete and tarmac: Crushed – then is made into 6F5 or Crushed Type 1 product (used in construction)
• Plastic/ window frames: Bailed - then made into pellets or briquettes and sold back to the plastic market to be made into plastic products.
• Builder’s bags: Bailed – recycled
• Film: Bailed – goes back into the plastic manufacturing process
• Metal: Segregated – this then goes to metal processors
• Nonferrous metals: Picking station – all non-ferrous metal will be recovered and go to metal processes
• Glass: Sorted – recycled

Anything that cannot be recycled (usually 15-20%) will be used for Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) or Energy From Waste (EFW), anything else will be landfilled.