London waste plant considering new technology that lets you scan and sort recycling using mobile phone

Evening Standard was shown how London’s second biggest recycling centre deals with the tonnes of parcel cardboard and single-use plastic packaging.

E-commerce waste makes up an increasing proportion of nearly 110,000 tonnes processed annually at the integrated waste management facility off Old Kent Road for Southwark council.

Cardboards and paper “fibre”, including newsprint, are about half of recyclable materials processed there and plastics are about 10 per cent.

Clean cardboard is turned into huge bales for sale to paper mills, while a small proportion too wet or grubby for re-use can be burned to create energy.

Richard Kirkman, Veolia’s chief technology and innovation officer, said they were looking at how barcodes could be replaced with Radio Frequency Identification tags, costing less than 10p each, to help people at home, and then the plant, sort their recycling more efficiently.

Consumers could scan packaging with phones and then Veolia would be able to screen huge amounts of waste when it arrives at Old Kent Road.

He said: “Packaging from boxes used for deliveries has really increased. We see a lot more brown, corrugated card, which is a very recyclable material.

“The challenge is complexity because over the years we’ve made packaging more complicated and some of it is laminated or has a lot of labels on it. We can improve the design of those materials to make it easier to recycle.”

He added: “Barcodes are pretty old technology, which has been on the side of a can of beans since the Seventies.

"We think there may be different labels, like RFID tags, that could really enable us to capture what people recycle, what’s difficult for them, and to track flows of materials through buying it to disposing of it.”

Fiona Nicholls of Greenpeace said: “More than a billion parcels are delivered across the UK every year, including millions in London, and many of them seem ludicrously over-packaged.”

An Amazon spokesman said: “We continue to pursue multi-year waste reduction initiatives - e-commerce ready packaging and Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging - to promote easy-to-open, 100 per cent recyclable packaging.”