The Secret World of Your Rubbish

The first episode features the owners of a landfill site in Wiltshire, who employ salvagers to find anything that can be reused, London refuse collectors, who reveal the difficulty of dealing with contaminated recycling, and the supervisor at a skip hire company, who has worked for the business since he was 11.

Workers at Crapper and Sons salvage what they can from the hundreds of tons of plastic that is brought in every month while 10,000 tons of compost is sold to local farmers every year. S Norton is a multi-million pound complex of hydraulic and electrical systems, where hundreds of people shred 1.5 million tons of steel per year, which is then shipped off to Turkey for use in steelworks around the world. Today.

This episode focuses on the work of Refood, which diverts rotting food from landfill and plugs it into the National Grid. If all the food wasted by UK homes was turned into energy, it could power more than 1.2 million homes. There is also a look at Sue and John Wellfare, who have made it their mission to recycle the unrecyclable. The pair sort items by hand, from biscuit wrappers and baby-food sachets to crisp packets, and have set up drop-off points for what would otherwise end up on the ground.