Just been in a Council briefing about waste management in the borough:
They said:
The current waste contractor does not require paper and card to be kept separate from the rest of the recycling.
COVID has impacted the service, especially a severe shortage of hgv drivers, including agency drivers.
The management team has daily crisis meetings.
Quite a lot of waste being put into the green bins is actually recyclable, such as cardboard and metal.
A lot more waste has been collected from homes during the pandemic, inevitably.
98% of residents think it is important to recycle. 66% think they could recycle more.
The Council is planning to implement a weekly food waste collection. They have costed a scheme which can be implemented over several years, and are now waiting for further guidance from Government.
The pandemic increased the borough’s recycling waste by 2000 tons.
The amount of contaminated recycling has significantly reduced.
The Government wants to move towards having recyclable materials all collected separately. This is likely to become the law.
Councillor Craig Hannaway 
Hi is our recyclable waste being dealt with in this country or sent abroad, and are you reporting that cardboard and paper no longer needs to be recycled.
Hi Trev, we have a new contract with a business in this country for recycling after the previous one went bust. On your other question, they still need recycling but the current contractor does not require paper to be put in a separate caddie.
Hi Craig. Shouldn’t the council be putting all waste resources into managing plastic waste and preventing single use plastic. Paper and card is afterall biodegradable whereas plastic causes long lasting environmental damage. I noted a couple of businesses in the front, one using the cheapest plastic takeaway forks and the other starting to sell cheap seaside plastic tat. Shouldn’t part of the lease agreement be that they are environmentally responsible, not just in recycling but not selling the stuff in the first place.
Very good point given the Council declared a Climate Emergency, though I think at the moment they can only encourage businesses to not use plastic rather than enforce it by law. If they tried to put in the lease agreement the businesses would challenge the legality (one business recently even tried to refuse to sign its lease until it was given its own parking spaces!) Presumably the Govt wanting to have different types of recyclable material collected separately in future will mean a separate plastic collection if they go through with it. The logistics will be a nightmare, but at least it will show how much plastic use there is. As ever, the environment tends to make hypocrites of most institutions – e.g. the Council declared a Climate Emergency and declared itself eager for thousands of tons of jet fuel to be burned in the Tees Valley almost in the same month!