Series following people around the UK working in waste disposal.
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.
The aptly named Crapper and Sons run a landfill site in Wiltshire where they oversee the disposal of more than 200 trucks of waste a day. But with space running out and landfill losing favour, the father and son need to find new ways of keeping their rubbish dynasty alive. The film also follows two technicians at a sewage works in west London, who have the unenviable task of removing the wet wipes and other rubbish that gets flushed down people's U-bends, and a team of litter collectors at Marylebone Station.
The waste disposal and recycling documentary follows the work of staff at Dungeness A, a decommissioned nuclear power station in Kent, who have to adopt extreme measures to maintain the site. At the other end of the spectrum are the security team at Stansted Airport, whose job it is to sort through wheelie bins full of prohibited items removed from passengers - with everything from Marmite and motor oil to dead rabbits turning up in hand luggage.
The documentary visits a waste facility in Nottingham which offers an alternative to landfill, burning rubbish to create energy for surrounding homes. It also follows the work of a Glasgow father and son who recycle some of the hundreds of thousands of tons of clothing thrown out every year and the team at Motorpoint Arena in Nottingham, cleaning up after a heavy metal gig.
The work of the rocket scientists at the University of Surrey Space Centre, who are researching how to remove the hundreds of thousands of space junk orbiting the Earth's atmosphere at 17,000mph, which could do catastrophic damage if they were to collide with a satellite. Also, a specialist waste disposal team tackles asbestos which, despite being banned more than 20 years ago, remains the leading cause of occupational death in the UK, and glass thrown into a bottle bank is recycled as a jam jar.
Complete episode guide for The Secret World of Your Rubbish with detailed information about every season and episode including air dates, summaries, ratings, and streaming availability in United States.
This episode guide is organized by seasons, making it easy to track your viewing progress or find specific episodes. Use the episode information to plan your binge-watching sessions or catch up on missed episodes.