They work at transfer stations – sites where waste from different sources is brought together to be sorted before being sent on to other sites for further processing. By the time most people are sipping their first cup of tea of the day, these workers will have been at work for two or three hours. They work on manual sorting lines – long conveyor belts down which mixed waste is moved by hand, item by item. The workers pull out timber, plasterboard, metal, hardcore and other materials and stack them into separate piles to be sent on to other sites for processing.
A snapshot of the work that goes on with waste management happens very early in the morning on manual sorting lines, where workers pull products off a conveyor belt and sort them into different fractions by hand.
Manual sorting lines on transfer stations became the standard practice in UK waste management in the 1990s. The landfill tax introduced in 1996 made it expensive to send mixed loads to land fill, so it became financially sensible to sort the waste first. But for materials to be sorted successfully into clean fractions, someone has to make fast and accurate decisions about each item, deciding what to keep and what to discard. They have to be able to recognise the difference between various types of construction timber, spot plasterboard contamination in a load of aggregate, and recognise hazardous waste by sight and smell even when it is not labelled.
The physical demands of sorting waste are acknowledged by the Health and Safety Executive in their publication of manual handling risks at waste transfer stations. This includes the potential for repetitive lifting, exposure to noise and the unpredictability of waste delivered. The sorting of waste often takes place in cold, and often poorly lit conditions and is a fast-paced activity. The sorters handle materials that have been compacted, contaminated by rain and mixed together and then sorted into individual materials.
It is skilled work disguised as unskilled work. When people book skip hire Norfolk like https://www.kentskips.com/ they are booking a steel box to arrive at their drive and then be collected at a time to suit them. They have no idea that at 5am someone will be spending 40 minutes or so to untangle the waste from the skip and sort it into separate materials for the recycling economy to use.
