Princess Anne paid a visit to the borough to open a new recycling facility yesterday.

The £25 million materials recycling facility at Smugglers Way, Wandsworth, was officially opened by The Princess Royal, where she unveiled a plaque to mark the occasion.

It will process around 84,000 tonnes of dry recyclables a year from the Western Riverside Waste Authority area, which includes Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, and Kensington and Chelsea.

She also visited Rework, a re-use workshop on the site which is set to open in July, which will take unwanted household appliances and sell them on to low income families.

The mayors of each borough in the authority also attended the event, and following the official opening ceremony, guests were invited to tour the facility and look at the recycling process in operation.

Kensington and Chelsea Councillor Tim Ahern, who is the chairman of the authority, said: “The re-use Workshop and the materials recycling facility, combined with our long running ‘Recycle Western Riverside’ campaign, clearly demonstrate the Authority’s determination to manage as much waste as possible, as high as possible up the waste hierarchy.”