'It's a human hand that has to clean up your mess': where does your recycling go?

From unwashed plastic milk bottles, dirty nappies, and black bin-liners, to passports, guns, and a dead Labrador, Donal O’Keeffe learns the worst things you can put in your recycling.

Every year, 20% of what Irish people put into household waste would have been recyclable, while perhaps 30% of what we put in recycling is actually general waste, which can often contaminate recyclables, rendering them useless.

It was cold and dark at 5am last Friday in Foxrock, the kind of prosperous South Dublin neighbourhood usually described as “leafy”, when Mihai Gociu and his colleagues Ioan Lupu and Viorel Curmel arrived in their spotless recycling truck. (Mihai says a good recycling truck should smell “like shampoo”.) On an average day, a recycling truck will visit between 1,000 and 1,500 homes. The firm Panda alone has 150 trucks on the road every day.

An engineer by training, Mihai came to Ireland 21 years ago, from Romania, but he found it impossible to get work here in his own speciality, so he took work as a driver, first for another waste management company, and then, 16 years ago, for Panda.