DCA visits the Sherbourne Recycling Facility in Coventry

It’s a sobering experience to see one of the products you have designed trundling along a recycling conveyor, amidst thousands of crumpled and battered packaging items from our domestic waste. We visited the Sherbourne Recycling facility in Coventry. This facility claims to be one of the best domestic recycling facility in the UK and ‘The future of waste management’.   

Dai Sanders, a senior manager in DCA’s consumer team said, ‘I’ve been to many recycling facilities in the past, and I must say I was encouraged by how sophisticated the processing has become’.  

Opened in 2021, this state-of-the-art facility processes the comingled waste material from domestic kerbside collections for 10 councils across the Midlands. Once the lorries deposit the waste, it runs through a series of stations, progressively separating the materials. The plant is almost fully automated, with only 5 people manually picking throughout the whole process. It uses a combination of well-established separation technologies like tumbling, magnets and eddy currents, gravity and pneumatic, alongside more advanced AI sensing and robotic picking technologies which are used towards the end of the line to identify and capture any unwanted material. This allows the facility to boast the lowest contamination rate in the country, enabling Sherbourne to ship the highest quality materials to one of their 5 UK off-takers, who can confidently process the materials to make new products.  

Visiting these centres is always valuable and educational for everyone involved. Our team was able to see first-hand how certain packaging items are processed, which components are most problematic and how we can better accommodate recycling requirements in future design development. In return, the team at Sherbourne were able to benefit from our awareness of the consumer and brand owner needs, the broader implications of global legislation and how we could collaborate more strategically on designing for circularity in the future.