Last night's Dispatches programme on Channel 4, about Britain's rubbish crisis in the making, was eye-opening.You can watch it again here.

It outlined concerns over the co-mingling of waste to be recycled, whereby paper, glass, plastic and metals are mixed up upon collection and subsequently separated at giant MRF facilities, and it was easy to see why.

I've often wondered how it could be possible to produce sufficiently clean waste streams from such a process, and it seems the simple answer is it's not. Or not necessarily, depending on what sort of MRF it is and who's running it. Little wonder various recycled paper and board makers have voiced concern about contaminants such as glass causing problems with their own processes. The programme's investigative reporter was shown examining the contents of a bale of recovered paper, which turned out to contain lots of plastic.

This sort of sub-standard recyclate either ends up in landfill or in faraway low-cost labour lands where people sit and sort it by hand. According to Dispatches, 55% of our recycled paper and 70% of our recycled plastic ends up being sent abroad to countries such as China.

Smurfit Kappa, Palm Paper and DS Smith Recycling are among the fellow claimants in the Campaign for Real Recycling's call for a judicial review into how Defra defines 'separate' waste collection.

Biffa, meanwhile, opposes the action. 

No wonder UPM has taken matters into its own hands with a ?17m materials recovery and recycling facility at its Shotton site.