'We've seen toilet seats and socks in blue bins'

Sarah Atkinson, a waste service manager at East Riding of Yorkshire Council, says most people are keen to recycle properly

Toilet seats, pool noodles and socks are among items incorrectly placed in household recycling bins.

East Riding of Yorkshire Council said rejected loads of recycling – which contain too many non-recyclable items – cost double the amount to process.

The task of dealing with the wrong types of waste is costing the council about £250,000 annually, though the figure has come down in recent years.

Sarah Atkinson, a waste services manager, said: "There's a thought that 'if I put it in the blue bin, perhaps they'll be able to sort it out at the end'."

However, while most people were "trying to do the right thing", only items accepted by reprocessing firms go forward for recycling.

Kerbside recycling waste is taken from the East Riding to a waste transfer station in Hull. From there, it is transported to a recycling facility in Hartlepool.

Contaminated loads of waste have to be sent for incineration, rather than recycling

The council no longer sends waste to landfill, so if a load cannot be recycled, it is sent for "energy recovery" – the process of converting waste into heat, electricity or fuel – and "none of it gets recycled".

"We have to pay to get that burned," Ms Atkinson said. "It costs about double the amount to send things to energy recovery than it does to recycle them.

"It's a real loss for the hard work that's been done. It's also the environmental cost of it going to the wrong place."

She said the council understood that working out which types of plastic went in which bins could be "confusing".

For example, (clean) yoghurt pots will be accepted, but hand cream tubes will not.

Publicity campaigns have helped the council save tens of thousands of pounds

Over the past year, the council has been running a campaign asking residents to put items into recycling bins loose, rather than in plastic bags, which cannot be recycled.

In some cases, refuse crews have tagged contaminated bins, warning people not to use bags.

"People have really got the message and helped us out," Ms Atkinson said.

The hard work has led to the bill for overly contaminated loads – those that have to be rejected – falling from about £70,000 in 2022-23 to just £4,500 in the past year.

Meanwhile, the cost of removing non-recyclable material from acceptable loads has also come down, but still costs about £250,000 per year.

The message from the council is: when in doubt, check on the website – which offers a comprehensive and searchable guide to what can and cannot be recycled.

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