I have just renewed the wiper blades on my car and was wondering if they can be recycled anywhere?

Ask your local council. they are plastics after all.

Any plastic that can be recycled has the little triangle symbol on it with a letter in the middle to identify what material it is. Without it landfill is the only route and even things that could in theory be recycled are not because it costs to much.

Much of our recycled materials are compressed into shipping containers and we pay for them to be sent to Asia where god knows what happens to it. Its still cheaper for the councils than paying landfill tax to central government.

I have just renewed the wiper blades on my car and was wondering if they can be recycled anywhere?

Unfortunately, what can be recycled by one council is not by another, and what can be via kerbside recycling (your own bins) rather than at a council recycling centre or tip varies significantly - the former being much reduced these days.

The wiper is likely to be made up the following:

• Metal housing with plastic clips etc holding the wiper at the ends in particular;
• A rubber or more likely combination of rubber and other substances for the blade.

Many of the above parts are likely to be glued together and thus difficult to properly separate without leaving bits of other materials (other than the glue) behind, and what plastics are used - not all are recyclable by councils. This is a similar problem when trying to recycle many food containers, such as sandwich packets or pastic food trays with non-recyclable plastic film lids.

I doubt if the blades are recyclable by your council; the metal parts will be, but they'll need to be fully separated from other materials and taken to the recycling centre, as they won't be collected with metal cans in your roadside bin.

Any plastic parts will need to be checked against your council's list of types of plastic that can be recycled and where. If the type cannot be determine (sometimes what it is is stamped on the part or the box the equipment, food etc came in originally (you may be able to find out by emailing the manufacturer) so you can check against the council's list.

Hard (rigid) plastics are almost never recyclable via roadside bin collections and only at the council sites, if at all. They have been cutting back on what can be recycled because countries like China, India etc have started to reduce what they take because so much ends up in dodgy landfills and burnt in an environmentally unfriendly way (see today's Telegraph for an article on this).

A pain to do all this, isn't it? The daft thing is, many people just pop anything they (often mistakenly) believe is recyclable (like ANYTHING made of plastic) in recycling bins, often contaminating the load, which can often mean all of it gets rejected and it goes to landfill instead.

I'd say these days we're far worse than 50+ years ago on waste despite recycling, because we use so much plastic and its very difficult to tell what is/isn't recyclable (poor labelling/education/differences between councils), plus its very time-consuming to adequately separate everything and to check if its recyclable, plus all food, dirt etc has to be cleaned off.