A READER’S query regarding recycling has resulted in a denial by Monmouthshire County Council that segregating recycling is a waste of time - although they concede the system at present is ‘Not ideal’.

Andrew Ward contacted the Chronicle with a picture of a refuse truck posing the question, ‘Why do we carefully bother to segregate our waste when it all gets minced up in the same lorry?’

We passed the query on to Monmouthshire County Council and Carl Touhig, Recycling Strategy Business Manager replied, ‘We ask residents to separate the recycling into the red and purple bags as this reduces the cross contamination of materials at source.

‘At present the bags are placed into one vehicle which is not ideal but the integrity of the materials is still far better than if the materials were in a single mixed bag.

‘We know that the more materials are separated the higher the resale value is when reprocessed, but this needs to be balanced against our residents’ satisfaction and the collection costs.’

Indicating that a change to more efficient waste segregation was necessary, he added,’The glass box trial has been a great success and we’ll be introducing separate glass collection across the county in the next financial year.

‘We will not only collect glass separately, we will also separate the red and purple bags with our split back pod vehicles.’