What is Recycling?
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. Sounds great, right? Recycling has always been seen as this really positive thing because it helps to reduce landfill, reduce pollution and reduce the amount of materials being used to make virgin materials.
However, the first issue with recycling, is that we have been led to believe that it’s a great solution to our waste problems. The rhyme, ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ is actually in order. If we want to reduce our footprint on the planet, it is more effective to reduce how much we are buying in the first place. In an ideal world, recycling should be one of the last options that we turn too, not the first.
Not only does recycling take more time and energy that reducing or reusing would, but a huge number of materials, including a lot of plastics, are actually not recyclable. If you are interested, I highly recommend you start reading the packaging on your food to see what it says. I think you’ll be shocked to see how much actually isn’t recyclable. Sainsburys are really great at stating on the packaging of all of their home brand products clearly whether it is recyclable or not. This is really insightful and it helps the consumer to make more informed purchases. Something all brands should have to do.
Plastic bags such as those that salad leaves are sold in, are often not recyclable. This means that they will end up in landfill, even if you put them in your recycling bin.
Recycling Contamination
Not only are a lot of plastics not recyclable, but a huge amount of plastics that are recyclable are not being recycled. It is estimated that only 9% of the plastic that has ever been produced has been recycled and another 12% has been incinerated. The other 79% still exists on the planet today. (source).
This is partly because of recycling contamination. Recycling contamination is when an item is contaminated by uncleanliness such as food residue or by the presence of incorrect materials, and it cannot be recycled. It will be sent from the recycling facility, to landfill.
This means that even if you put that salad bag into the recycling, it will not be recycled. Furthermore if a load of recycling is deemed to be contaminated to the point where it is not worth sorting, the the entire load may be sent to landfill.
In some cities one contaminated item can deem an entire load contaminated. This means that not only are your salad bags not being recycled, but that their presence in the recycling stream is preventing other recyclable plastics from being recycled.
This is because lots of recycling companies, see recycling as a business, not a obligation. If it would take cost more to pay worker to sort through the recycling, than they would get for recycling, they won’t bother. There aren’t strict enough laws to stop this from happening, even though we, as the consumer, expect our recycling to be dealt with properly when we put it out on the curb.
Aspirational Recycling
Aspirational recycling is when individuals feel something should be recyclable and so they throw it into the recycling bin under the assumption that if it’s not, the people sorting through the recycling at the recycling facility will simply take it out.
However, because of recycling contamination, aspirational recycling can actually cause more damage than good because it can cause lots of recyclable plastic to not be recycled because it is deemed to be contaminated.
Lots of recycling companies go as far as to suggest "When it doubt, throw it out."
Another reason why lots of plastic instead being recycled is simply because of failures in recycling chains, and companies and countries failing to take responsibility for their own waste. I recommend watching BBC: War on Plastic if you want to learn more about this.
A researcher from MIT even goes as far as to suggest putting plastic waste into landfill bins instead of into recycling bins where it is at least well-managed and won’t end up in the sea. Did you know that a lot of the plastic in the sea is coming from failed recycling, not from landfill. This research suggests that instead of devoting our time an energy to a really poor recycling scheme like we have at the moment, that by sending it all to landfill we could devote that time to climate change instead.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you not to recycle at all but I definitely think its something worth think about.
Closed Loop Recycling
The type of recycling that most people are familiar with is known as Open-loop recycling. This is what your curb side recycling is. This is when the materials are converted into new raw materials. Typically, materials recycled through open-loop recycling go on to be used for purposes different from their former, pre-recycled purpose. However open-loop recycling is often associated with a degradation. A simple example is that paper decreases in quality when it is recycled and can only be recycled so many times. For this reason, open-loop recycling is also referred to as downcycling or reprocessing.
Closed loop recycling on the other hand, involves collecting similar items so that they can be remade into the original item. Aluminum can recycling is an example of a closed-loop recycling process because aluminum can be recycled to form new cans with little material degradation or waste creation.
However, aluminium cans are except because of how widely they are used. In most cases, for closed loop recycling to work effectively, a brand or brand making similar products would have to collect the items and recycle them themselves.
There are 3 reasons why closed loop recycling is so much better than open loop recycling.
1. The first is this reduction in degradation. By collecting similar materials and using them for their original purchase there is less likely to be a drop in quality. This is because they might not need to be put through as intense treatments. Imagine if you could send your old phone back to the manufacturer. They may be able to take some components out of the phone and reuse them without having to melt them down and reform them, which often reduces their quality. Degradation is also caused by the presence of mixed materials which can lead the new materials to being more brittle and less durable.
2. Closed loop recycling also leads to less waste because if items are brought back to original manufacturer, there are much less likely to get lost in the recycling process and end up in landfill.
3. Another benefit of closed loop recycling is a reduced need for virgin materials. The issue with our current recycling scheme is that their isn’t much demand for these recycled materials. And how are we expected to manage our plastic problem when we are constantly pumping new plastic into the loop. A circular system doesn’t work when we are constantly pumping in new materials and making the circle bigger.
Make Companies Responsible for their Waste
One way to reduce this issue would be to make companies, especially the larger ones, responsible for their waste and the harm the are directly causing to the environment.
One way to do this is to pay for recycling. It should be possible to work out the cost of recycling one aluminum can, and the coca-cola should have to pay this, for every can they produce to the recycling facilities.
Currently recycling centres make a lot of their money by selling the recycled materials, which is why they don’t both if it doesn’t make sense economically. Hopefully, if this was paid for by businesses, it would help recycling to become more of an obligation and less of a business, meaning more time would be spent sorting through contaminated recycling.
Secondly, and the much better option. Companies should collect their waste and reuse it themselves. A really great example of this is Lush Black Pots. When you have finished with this, you can take them back to the lush store and they are collected, broken down and remade into more black pots. This initiative to take on responsibility for their own waste is great and for me, it’s a USP that makes me want to shop at Lush.
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