Waste not, want not: how the rubbish industry learned to look beyond landfill

With rise of incineration and heavy taxes, refuse management has evolved beyond mere dumps – but sector experts warn of complacency over recycling

A yellow monster truck pushes mounds of rubbish across the summit of Britain’s biggest waste mountain. The 50-tonne beast has huge, spiked, steel wheels that grind mattresses, plastic bottles, trainers and traffic cones into the mud of the manmade peak.

This strange landscape is Packington landfill, near Birmingham. And this week Sita UK, which owns and operates the site, closed its gates for the final time. A boom in recycling, coupled with the 1996 landfill tax have slowly choked the life out of the refuse disposal sector. The charge of £80 a tonne will rise again to £82.60 from April, forcing the industry to deal with its waste in different ways.