Table of Contents

UK plastic waste being dumped and burned in Turkey, says Greenpeace

BBC News
17 May 2021

• Greenpeace said about 40% of the UK’s plastic waste exports were sent to Turkey last year.
• But rather than being recycled, investigators saw some of it dumped by roads, in fields and in waterways.
• Greenpeace’s report warned Turkey was becoming Europe’s “largest plastic waste dump”.
• The UK generates more plastic waste per person than any other country apart from the US, the report added.
• Turkey, Malaysia and Poland received the largest amounts of plastic waste exports from the UK in 2020.

Why some countries are shipping back plastic waste?

BBC News
Published June 2019

• Many wealthy countries send their recyclable waste overseas because it’s cheap, helps meet recycling targets and reduces domestic landfill.
• For developing countries taking in the rubbish, it’s a valuable source of income.
• But contaminated plastic and rubbish that cannot be recycled often gets mixed in and ends up in illegal processing centres.
• Materials that can’t be recycled end up being burned illegally, dumped in landfills or waterways, creating risks to the environment and public health.
• Due to China’s ban, global plastic waste exports dipped by almost half by the end of 2018, compared with 2016 levels. Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey, India and Poland all took up the slack.
• Malaysia took a major share - the plastic waste it imported from 10 countries in just the first six months of 2018 was nearly as much as the total it received in 2016 and 2017.
• Malaysia has revoked import permits and has been clamping down on illegal processing plants.
• The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (Gaia) says after a clear dip, “imports have begun rising again in the last quarter of 2018, suggesting challenges in enforcing respective country bans”.

Why plastic recycling is so confusing

18 December 2018
BBC

• All four nations of UK have set their recycling rate targets (Scotland 70% by 2025, as does Wales. Northern Ireland 60% municipal waste by 2020.)
  
• BBC analysis shows there are 39 different sets of rules for what can be put in plastic recycling collections: Most collect bottles; Others collect pots, tubs and trays; Some collect a much wider range.

• Waste plastic is collected in different ways too: Some local authorities collect all their recycling in one bin; Others ask households to separate their plastics from the rest of their recycling; Councils also employ many different companies to collect and sort their plastics.
• And having different recycling schemes in different areas - for example, in some areas you can recycle margarine tubs and in other areas you cannot - makes labelling difficult.
• How is the government proposing to tackle plastic recycling?

1. Tackle the current postcode recycling lottery under which different materials are recyclable in different areas
2. Introduce consistent labelling on packaging so consumers know what they can recycle
3. Make the firms that produce materials responsible for the cost of disposing of those items
4. Encourage manufacturers to design products that last longer and increase the levels of repair and re-use
5. Crack down on waste crime by introducing electronic tracking of waste shipments
6. Introduce a tax on plastic packaging made of less than 30% recycled plastic
7. Ban plastic packaging where an alternative material could be used
8. Improve the quality of plastic being exported

• Plastic can often become too contaminated for recycling and have to be sent to landfill or incinerated instead. This happens for several reasons:

1. People are confused about what goes in which bin.
2. People are not always very careful about what they put in.
3. The plastic is contaminated with food waste.
4. In areas where all recycling is collected in one bin, one type of waste can contaminate another.

1. Bottles are mainly made of PET (Polyethylene terephthalate /ˌterəf’θæleit/) and HDPE (High-density polyethylene) and these are easy to collect and recycle.
2. Most trays are made from polypropylene (PP) and this is pretty easy to recycle too but not all councils have access to the right facilities.
3. LDPE (low density polyethylene), used to make some carrier bags and cling film, is easy to process but more difficult to sort and can often be contaminated with food.
4. Polystyrene (PS), used to make some yoghurt pots and plastic cutlery, is not widely recycled.
5. PVC makes up small amount of packaging but can contaminate other plastic recycling.
6. Biscuit wrappers and meat trays can be made from a mixture of many different types of plastic, making them the most difficult type of packaging to recycle.

All plastic can be recycled - but it is not always economical to do so.

• Bottles attract the best prices, especially clear ones, which is why almost all councils recycle them
• Coloured plastic is less desirable because the colour cannot be removed, restricting its reuse
• Polystyrene is almost never recycled because there is no market for it.

Most bottles will be sent for reprocessing in this country.

But plastic that is less valuable - about two-thirds collected for recycling - goes overseas and this figure has been rising.

Earlier this year, the National Audit Office reported the plastic sent abroad could be highly contaminated, meaning it may not be reprocessed and could end up in landfill or contributing to pollution.

These bans are having an effect on the prices paid for waste plastic.

And this year the prices of the more contaminated plastics have fallen below zero, meaning companies are now expecting to be paid to take them away.

Could making recycling pay save the planet?

BBC
By Tim Harford
29 May 2019

Sail up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, and you come to the industrial city of Dongguan, where you’ll find what may be the world’s biggest paper mill, larger than 300 football pitches.

It’s owned by Nine Dragons, a recycling company started by Zhang Yin, also known as Cheung Yan, once ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest self-made woman.

Nine Dragons is - or, perhaps, was - the largest importer by volume of American goods into China.

Those goods? Waste paper - typically with some unwelcome trash mixed in. Tonne upon tonne was baled /beɪl/, stacked on to ships and sailed to China, where workers manually sorted through it.

It is a crucial job: if waste paper is too contaminated, it cannot be recycled.

It is also a job that is hard to automate successfully. It needs humans.

So rich countries started shipping their waste to countries where workers are poor enough to sort it for wages low enough to turn a profit.

From the 1980s until very recently, this system worked smoothly.

China’s fast-growing economy exported lots of manufactured goods, and instead of ships returning empty, they were loaded with waste for China to recycle.

Entrepreneurs such as Mrs Yin made a fortune.

But as China got richer, the government decided it no longer wanted to be a dumping ground for the world’s trash.

It 2017, it announced its National Sword policy, under which China would only accept well-sorted rubbish containing no more than half of 1% of stuff that should not be there. That was a big change - contamination rates used to reach 40 times that.

The amount of waste being shipped to China plunged.

Governments and recycling companies scrambled to adjust.

Should they find other countries poor enough to accept their badly sorted waste, or raise taxes to pay higher-wage workers to sort it better, or do something else?

There is a reason the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra/‘mæntrə/咒语 is in that order. Rinsing and refilling glass bottles makes more sense than crushing and melting them to make new ones.

Examples of reuse go back before paper, to papyrus: Ancient Greece gave us the word “palimpsest”, which literally means “scraped clean to be used again”.

The Romans melted old bronze statues to sculpt new ones, and 1,000 years ago, Japan pulped paper to make more paper.

For centuries people have scraped a living by scavenging /ˈskævəndʒ/ for scrap, such as rags to sell to paper mills.

But that was all driven by market incentives: the raw materials were too valuable to be thrown away.

The idea that we should recycle because it is the right thing to do is much more recent.

Consider a Time magazine article from August 1955 headlined “Throwaway Living”. The adjective is not pejorative - it is celebratory.

“Disposable items cut down household chores,” it says.

A smiling family fills its bin with paper plates, plastic cutlery and other objects which, the article tells us, “would take 40 hours to clean - except that no housewife need bother”.

Why wash up after cooking when you can use a foil “Disposa-pan”, or a throwaway barbecue, complete with handy asbestos stand?

A TV ad campaign known as “The Crying Indian” helped shift the mood, in America at least.

First shown in 1971, it shows a Native American man paddling his canoe down a trash-polluted river, and standing by a road as a passing motorist tosses a bag of fast-food detritus at his feet.

“People start pollution,” runs the voiceover. “People can stop it.”

The Native American man turns to the camera, a single tear rolling down his cheek.

But the advert was not all it seemed, and not just because the actor turned out to be a second-generation Italian immigrant.

It was funded by an organisation backed by leading beverage and packaging companies.

At the time, deposit schemes were common: buy a fizzy drink, and get some cash back when you return the bottle. This model assumes it is the manufacturer’s job to provide the incentives and logistics for returning waste.

The Crying Indian had a different message. People were responsible for their own waste.

Deposit schemes fell out of fashion. Recycling logistics became seen as a matter for local government.

Historian Finis Dunaway argues that turning “big systemic problems into questions of individual responsibility” in this way was a bad idea.

It made recycling less about effective action, more about making ourselves feel good.

That seems to chime with research by behavioural economists at Boston University, who found that people who know they can recycle tend to act more wastefully.

That would not matter if recycling was cost-free, but of course, it is not.

The economist Michael Munger also argues that it is a bad idea to leave waste disposal to the free market.

If you charge people what it costs to safely dispose of their rubbish, you tempt them to dump it illegally instead, and that is much worse.

But once we use taxes to subsidise waste disposal, we risk incentivising the behaviour in the Time magazine article - people can chuck stuff away when society bears the costs.

How do we get them to recycle instead? One solution is the moral persuasion of The Crying Indian adverts.

But that also creates a problem, says Munger, in an essay for US think tank The Cato Institute.

He says we should simply compare the costs and benefits of recycling each kind of waste - glass bottles, tin cans, plastic coffee cups etc against other options.

Well-designed landfills are nowadays pretty safe, and we can harness the methane they produce for electricity.

Modern waste incinerators can be a clean-ish source of power.

If instead we treat recycling as a moral question, when do we stop? That brings us back to the conundrum posed by China’s National Sword policy.

Paring back recycling programmes would make sorting easier. But it seems like a backward step.

Taiwan - once dubbed “garbage island” - now famously has one of the highest recycling rates in the world.

How? By making sure that waste disposal “sits firmly in the public consciousness”, Ying-Ying Lai, head of the Taiwan Environmental Protection Administration’s waste management department, told the Smithsonian Magazine.

If they can do it, why can’t everyone else?

Perhaps we need systemic answers: maybe regulators can encourage new business models like those bottle deposit schemes making manufacturers think through the incentives and logistics for recycling their products.

Many of these discussions are happening under the voguish phrase “the circular economy”, a concept also cited by Taiwan’s Ying-Ying Lai.

Or perhaps technology will come to the rescue.

One UK start-up says that it can turn mixed plastics - notoriously difficult to recycle - back into the oil from where they came.

A mall in Australia recently gave a debut to an artificial intelligence-enabled trash can which senses what is put in it, and sorts it accordingly.

State-of-the-art sorting facilities use robots, lasers, magnets and air jets to separate different recyclable streams.

None of this can yet compete with the scale of the work done by low-cost labourers in China and beyond - but maybe closing off that option will prove just the spur to innovation that the industry needs.

What’s holding up Scotland’s bottle deposit scheme?

BBC
17 November 2021

Scotland’s bottle return scheme seems likely to suffer further days, with the Scottish government blaming Covid-19, Brexit and a row over tax rules.

The scheme will add 20p to the price of products sold in some plastic drinking containers, cans and glass with the money being refunded when the containers are returned.

The government originally outlined its plans in 2017, saying it represented “a step change in our level of ambition” for recycling

Ministers had originally hoped the scheme would start in April 2021, but this was pushed back to July 2022, with the government blaming the pandemic.

It is now widely expected to be delayed again after Circular Economy Minister Lorna Slater told MSPs that a number of other issues were holding up the system, including Brexit.

She also claimed there had been a “lack of clarity” from the UK government over the tax status of the 20p deposits.

Ms Slater insisted that the government remains fully committed to implementing the scheme - but would not give a timescale for when it would actually happen.

Environmental group Greenpeace has been critical of the government, saying that a further delay would mean “millions more cans and bottles needlessly dumped and burned”.

And opposition parties have said it as an example of the government’s environmental rhetoric not being matched by its actions.

What type of containers will be included in the scheme?
The scheme will apply to all types of drinks in containers between 50ml and three litres in size.

Glass containers have been included in the scheme, despite some criticism from the glass industry.

Reality Check: Is this how to cut plastic waste?
The Scottish government has said that HDPE-made plastic bottles, which are typically used to carry milk, will not be included.

However, containers made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - which typically carry fizzy drinks and water - will be subject to the deposit return.

How will it work?
Effectively, 20p - the deposit - will be added to the price of a single-use drinks container bought from a shop.

The consumer will get their deposit back when they return the empty bottle or can to the retailer.

The scheme will operate throughout Scotland, including rural areas and all retail outlets will have to comply, regardless of size.

Businesses selling drinks which are opened and consumed on site - such as pubs and restaurants - will not have to charge the deposit to the public.

How will I get my deposit back?
There will be two ways you can return your empty container - over the counter, or by using a reverse vending machine (RVM).

An RVM is a machine that scans containers when they are returned and then refunds your deposit.

The government says there will be a range of ways you can get your 20p back, for example cash at a till, a token or discount voucher or digitally. The returned containers are stored in the machine and are then collected for recycling.

As well as retailers and hospitality businesses, schools and other community hubs will be able to act as return locations.

Who will be in charge of this scheme?
The government says an independent, privately-run, not-for-profit company will be in charge.

It adds that the system will be paid for through three sources of funding - unredeemed deposits, revenue from the sale of materials and a producer fee.

Is this also happening in the rest of the UK?
Scotland could still be the first nation in the UK to introduce a bottle deposit return scheme as recycling is a devolved issue.

A consultation on the introduction of a similar scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland was carried out by the UK government last year.

A four-week pilot for a deposit return scheme was recently run in Conwy in north Wales.

What are microplastics?

https://www.ecomatters.nl/news/restriction-on-intentionally-added-microplastics/

• Microplastics are solid plastic particles composed of polymers and functional additives less than 5 millimetres in size.
• Already, microplastics have been found in almost all marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems as well as in food and drinking water.
• Current bans mainly focus on the application of scrubbing microbeads in cosmetics. These beads are rinsed off after use and migrate to sewage treatment plants and surface waters.

Bioplastics–alternatives to fossil-based plastics

• Recently, a stronger EU regulatory focus on the different stages of the plastic lifecycle and a growing public scrutiny regarding plastic waste.
• Current regulations covering plastics are not consistent or suited to the specifics of bioplastics.

The new plastics economy: Rethinking the future of plastics & catalysing action

Ellen MacArthur Foundation with the support of the World Economic Forum
www.newplasticseconomy.org

• Each year, at least 8 million tonnes of plastics leak into the ocean –
  which is equivalent to dumping the contents of one garbage truck into the ocean every minute.
• Scale up the adoption of industrially compostable plastic packaging for targeted applications such as garbage bags for organic waste and food packaging for events.
• Drastically reduce the leakage of plastics into natural systems and other negative externalities.
• The plastics industry as a whole is highly reliant on finite stocks of oil and gas, which make up more than 90% of its feedstock.

• The externalities related to the use of plastics and plastic packaging are concentrated in three areas: degradation of natural systems as a result of leakage, especially in the ocean; GHG resulting from production and after-use incineration; and health and environmental impacts from substances of concern.

• An LCA optimisation by each individual actor does not necessarily lead to better system outcomes (while it is well suited to evaluate individual choices today, it is less suitable for determining the target state towards which a system as a whole could innovate).
• Another drawback is considering only carbon, leaving behind the effects of leakage into the natural environment.
• Format and delivery model redesign could reduce or eliminate the need for small-format plastic packaging items (e.g. for former one, tear-off tabs to stay-on tabs, flip-top cap of ketchup; for latter one, a dispenser instead of sachets or ‘disappearing package’ (water-soluble laundry detergent pods))

How Many Times Can Plastic Be Recycled? The seven types of plastic vary in their recycling potential.

Treehugger
Olivia Young, Updated August 13, 2021

• Waste Plastics can be recycled one to 10 times, depending on the type, although most can be recycled only once.
• the heating process shortens polymer chains, thus degrading plastic quality

1 PET

When PET plastic is turned into a non-food container, it may be able to endure a second or third round of recycling, but when it’s spun into polyester fiber—most often the case —then it becomes more difficult to recycle because large-scale postconsumer textile recycling doesn’t currently exist.

2 HDPE

• HDPE can be recycled 10 times under experiment conditions.

3 PVC

not recycled

4 LDPE

LDPE can be recycled only once because the quality is so degraded

5 PP

PP can be recycled four times

6 PS

Traditional PS is not recyclable

7 Other

Not many curbside services will pick up

How many times can plastic be recycled?

https://www.plasticexpert.co.uk/how-many-times-can-plastic-be-recycled/

• The majority of the time, all of these plastics can only be recycled once.
• The fact is that plastics lose their quality when they’re recycled.
• As such, the majority of plastics only get recycled once and then used in other products that can be used for longer and avoid going into landfill sites.