Thanks to the Recoup website, I found a local, private company that handles this kind of plastic, and yesterday loaded myself up on our folding bike, with its helpful little pannier rack on the back, and took it six miles or so to the forbidding mechanical gates of the center, which opened for me on my bike with a few jerks and shudders. I saw many stories-high stacks of various containers along the warehouse space, some broken and some new-looking, suggesting that the recycling process actually took place there, rather than just sorting, as is the case at local household waste locations.
The man who met me was really helpful, and told me which of the motley load of old containers were usable. He seemed pleased to see some labels removed in advance, and a good 90% or the plastic qualified for recycling. The one category that turned out to be practically non-recyclable was code 6, polystyrene, a white, brittle material used for the small, single-serving yogurt products like Activia.
It was a huge relief to clear it all out, although I suppose the future for these materials is likely reuse as polypropylene containers, perhaps in food service, after which, the difficulty of getting them to a recycling center will probably lead them to be dumped in landfill after all. In this sense, I may be just passing the responsibility on to the next consumer. Southampton Council's website indicates they take code 5 plastics, but many councils exclude it, and I don't know if there is any movement to expand the service to include these containers.
People are lucky in the U.S. in this sense, as there are collection points at Whole Foods for PP (see earth911). The larger solution, I feel, would be to cut down on the original use of plastics in so many food packaging processes, as has been done in Himacahal Pradesh. India has a pretty dizzyingly frugal recycling system in certain slums, where people specialize in a certain class of plastic collection, use a kind of rough teamwork to process, from what I've seen in a report on Channel 4, virtually 100% of plastic waste, and, unsurprisingly, suffer various health problems related to their work. Here's a CNN page about recycling in Mumbai.
I hope we, in well-off Western countries, can find ways of following India's lead in waste practices. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the void left by an absent heap of plastic in our grubby recycling bin (which is itself almost certainly polypropylene as well).
