Plastic Fantastic
An exploration of the messy world of plastics recycling
Hello, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a non-News FtF post, for which I can only apologise! My last one, diving into the environmental impact of aviation (you can find it here and here if you missed it!), was meant to be the first in a series of articles and explainers, but well… *gestures to the last 18 months*. The combination of burnout, managing time with other projects, and a tendency towards excessive thoroughness has meant my various attempts to cover other topics since then have all been false starts.
However, I’m trying again, with a more manageable strategy to avoid year-long interludes between these posts. I can’t promise any kind of schedule at this point, but hopefully more often than in the past! Thanks for bearing with the stop-start nature of this side of FtF, and as always, I’d love to hear what you think!
Today, I want to take a look at recycling, more specifically, the recycling of plastic. Why is it so hard? How did we end up with such a messy system, and more importantly, what can be done to improve things going forward?
A brief history of (plastics) recycling
Plastics are possibly one of the most ubiquitous man-made materials on the planet. They are everywhere – the chances are that no matter where you are, at least one item, and probably many within your vision right now are made of plastic. Thanks to its wide-ranging properties and mouldability, plastic is immensely useful as a material, and we produce vast quantities of it, with around 50kg produced annually per person.
However, that ubiquity comes with a serious environmental cost – plastics can take centuries to fully degrade, and plastic waste is becoming a massive problem. Microplastics (sub-5mm plastic fragments) have been found in almost every environment on the planet, from the highest mountain tops to the Arctic and the depths of the deepest ocean trenches. Microplastics have also been found in water supplies, and are ingested by all manner of life, from plankton all the way up to humans.
Unfortunately, plastics recycling is a mess, with only an estimated 9% of all plastic produced ever recycled, and around 1% recycled more than once. Over half is sent straight to landfill. Even worse, most of that recycling is open-loop – the quality of the plastic is reduced each time it is recycled, eventually becoming waste.
But how did we get here? How did this incredibly useful material propagate with no mechanism to effectively dispose of or reuse it? The answer, unfortunately, is largely corporate greed. Plastics manufacturers identified the problem of plastic waste at least 40 years ago, and realised that they would be unable to keep creating more plastic products without a solution. However, their own research identified that recycling plastic was complex, imperfect and expensive. Rather than look into solutions or alternative materials, the companies spent millions funding campaigns to promote recycling, as well as to push the burden of responsibility onto consumers.
They did this largely to avoid more punitive measures – they feared that if no solution was forthcoming to the plastic waste issue, they would face bans or other policy initiatives that would limit or curtail their businesses. However, if the public believed recycling works, there would be less political pressure to act against waste.
This has led to the odd state plastic recycling exists in today. The public has been convinced that recycling works, so a service has been created, but because it is fuelled from public demand rather than an economic or technical grounding, every implementation is different. Basically, the goal of the service is not to maximise recycling volumes or efficiency, but to create an impression that plastic can be recycled, regardless of the behind-the-scenes reality.
Plastic today
Types of plastic
Plastic products are generally divided into seven groupings based on the resins used, known as the Resin Identification Code, or RIC. These numbers are the ones you’ll often see stamped into plastic products, usually surrounded with a mobius loop. From top to bottom:
RIC 1: PETE/PET – Polyethylene terephthalate
RIC 2: HDPE/PE-HD –High-density polyethylene
RIC 3: PVC/V – Polyvinyl chloride
RIC 4: LDPE/PE-LD – Low-density polyethylene
RIC 5: PP – Polypropylene
RIC 6: PS – Polystyrene
RIC 7: OTHER/O – Other types of plastic/combination plastics
Of these, some can be recycled, others not so much. As mentioned before, most plastic recycling is open-loop, meaning that it decreases in quality each time it is recycled, but some types are better than others. PET is fairly recyclable, as are HDPE and LDPE. Polypropylene can be also recycled, but most of the others are either difficult to recycle, or largely aren’t.
What determines what is recycled?
There are a host of different reasons why a given product is or isn’t recyclable. A key factor is whether it can be easily separated – every resin has different properties, and a pick-n-mix is not generally useful as a material nor easy to recycle. The plastic also needs a consistent and relatively simple recycling process, and not be overly contaminated. Many plastics will contain additives, from food safe coatings to colourants to fire retardants, and all of these can affect how easily it can be processed. Lastly, it needs to be economically viable to recycle – the end product must have enough value to justify the recycling process.
Ultimately, most plastic breaks down somewhere along this chain, meaning it is not worth the effort and cost to recycle. After all, if no-one will buy the recylced plastic, all you’ve done is turn waste into waste with extra steps.
Variance in approach
As a result, where local authorities have recycling solutions in place it’s often heavily limited, and can vary by area depending upon what’s recycled, and what’s done with the plastic afterwards. For example, here in the UK where I live, each local council has its own approach to recycling, largely dictated by the company that runs its waste services. Some split out different types of recycling, some mix everything. When it comes to plastic, there are often extensive lists of what is and isn’t accepted in recycling, and these change drastically from council to council.
I recently moved, and my previous collection accepted most types of plastic, which was collected mixed in with all other recycling. At my new flat, recycling is split in two, and the plastics accepted are very limited, with only milk cartons and shampoo bottles (no lids!) being on the approved list.
This variance makes it hard even for those who care about recycling. It’s hard even for those like me who know about the different types of plastic and rules to know what is and isn’t OK. Many packages have the mobius loop recycling symbol, and here in the UK, most supermarket products now say how you can recycle each part of the packaging. This is a great move, but there often end up being clashes – the local rules say one thing, the package says another. The result is that many things are put in the recycling which aren’t accepted, which can contaminate batches and lead to even more recycling being landfilled.
Outsourcing
Many western countries have also, for decades, shipped their recycling abroad, much of it to China. This allowed them to outsource the problem, delegating sorting, cleaning and recycling plastics to the other side of the world, where any issues were someone else’s problem.
Of course, China and other countries accepting on the receiving end didn’t have a magic recycling solution, they just had cheap labour and lower waste standards. In 2017 China tightened its import rules dramatically, only allowing higher grade sorted plastics in. This resulted in a rare insight into the recycling world – with low-grade recycling piling up, suddenly much of it had to be landfilled or incinerated domestically, particularly in the US, making it much more apparent how little plastic was really reused.
This remains an open problem – some nations have found other countries willing to take their low-grade waste, but with the easiest solution off the table, another answer has yet to be found.
What can be done?
Technological solutions
A major challenge with all recycling, not just plastics, is sorting. Some materials such as glass and metals are easier to filter out, but plastics in particular remain a problem. Even the most sophisticated recycling facilities usually have a large number of human sorters manually filtering out different kinds of waste. This is boring and hard work, often poorly paid, and can be dangerous, as all manner of nasty items find their ways into waste streams.
Side note – if you get a chance to tour a recycling facility, I’d recommend it, they are surprisingly interesting!
A few firms are looking at automatic sorting robots, using high tech grabbers and computer vision to identify and filter out different types of waste. However, this is a really hard problem to solve – identifying a myriad of different items that are crushed together, misshapen, possibly soiled, and then grabbing them accurately is unbelievably complex.
A second opportunity is the plastics themselves. This can take two forms, either making better plastics that are more easily recyclable with less processing and waste, or improving existing techniques for processing current materials. There are a host of companies working on sophisticated techniques for converting plastic waste into an array of useful products, from fuels to plastic feedstocks.
A related area is finding better plastic alternatives where possible – either biodegradable materials or more resilient alternatives that can be easily reused. A few firms have trialled refill and container reuse approaches, and I suspect we’ll see more of this in future, though it will require a rethink of current supply chains.
Lastly are consumer-centric approaches – ways to simplify the world of recycling. These could include apps which nudge consumers towards products with better packaging, or that can scan product barcodes and match those to local recycling rules, enabling the public to better navigate the world of recycling.
Policy solutions
Ultimately, whilst technical solutions can improve parts of the existing process, the core issue lies with companies’ attitude towards responsibility, as well as wider questions of prices and incentives for using recycled materials. This means that policy is always going to be the biggest lever when it comes to improving plastic recycling.
Policies need to push companies to take responsibility for the products and packaging that they create. This is not just useful for packaging and plastics – it can help combat designed obsolescence in electronics and other areas, encouraging manufacturers to make products that are designed to last.
Deposit schemes are one idea that can help with packaging disposal. Germany’s bottle deposit scheme is relatively well known – consumers pay a small premium on bottled products, which they can then receive back by returning the bottles to a collection point. Similar schemes have been proposed and/or implemented across the world, as well as for different types of product, such as coffee cups, another huge source of waste.
Another area policy can also help is on the demand side of recycling. A key factor in recycling of plastic being so ineffective is that the material used is often lower quality than virgin plastic and more expensive. Companies have little incentive to use the recycled material, keeping the cycle going. Taxes on products made from entirely new plastic, single-use plastic or incentives for using recycled plastic can increase adoption, providing a nudge to push the market in the right direction.
To conclude...
Plastic recycling is a big problem, and will remain so as long as we continue using and producing so much plastic. It’s a wonderfully versatile material, and is unlikely to drop out of use any time soon, but with a combination of policy nudges and improved technology, there’s hope that its impact on the world can be reduced significantly.
As with any complex area, this barely scrapes the surface, and there’s plenty more nuance and subtlety, but hopefully this serves as a good overview. What do you think? Have I missed anything significant? Let me know! And if you’ve any ideas for topics you’d like to see me cover in a similar article, please do reach out!