How recycling is actually sorted, and why Australia is quite bad at it
- Written by Jeff Seadon, Senior Lecturer, Auckland University of Technology
Recycling in Australia used to be fairly simple. Our older readers may remember bottle drives, paper and cardboard collections, and the trip to the scrap metal merchant to sell metals.
This is called, in recycling parlance, sorting the “streams”. It creates very clean recycling that requires little sorting at a plant.
But recycling got...