The myth of plastic recycling is finally unravelling
Consumers want something to be done about plastic pollution. Recycling is something. Therefore oil companies, manufacturers and retailers are doing it. The trouble is, many of these initiatives are muddle-headed, some fall way short of their promise and others are actively causing more environmental damage than they are preventing.
Tesco’s recent travails are a case in point. In 2021, the supermarket set up bins in its stores in which customers could leave their difficult-to-recycle “soft plastics”, like the low density polyethylene from shopping bags and film lids. At the time the company boldly forecast it would “collect more than 1,000 tonnes a year” and planned to “recycle as much of this material as possible back into products and packaging sold in Tesco stores”.
However, according to a recent investigation by the Environmental Investigation Agency and the pressure group Everyday Plastic, the vast majority of this waste ended up being incinerated rather than being recycled. ClientEarth, a non-government organisation that specialises in environmental law, says the results of the investigation show that supermarket soft plastic take-back schemes are misleading customers.
The problem appears to be widespread and certainly not limited to soft plastics. According to Greenpeace and the pressure group Everyday Plastic, 58 per cent of all plastic waste in the UK is incinerated, 14 per cent is exported to other countries and 11 per cent is sent to landfill. Just 17 per cent is actually recycled.
The issue has gained increasing attention since 2018 when China banned the importing of recycling waste and stopped accepting the West’s unwanted plastic. Since 1992, China has received 106 million tons of plastic waste. But now exporting countries have had to deal with it themselves. Many are struggling.
In the US, the issue has been in particular focus in recent weeks. Last month, California filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against ExxonMobil alleging it falsely promoted the recyclability of plastic. The state has a point. Some of the promises that have been made about chemical recycling, which is used to deal with more tightly bonded thermosetting plastics, appear to have been overly optimistic. However, the vast majority of plastics don’t fall under this category and the relatively nascent technology is likely to improve in time.
No wonder consumers are confused. Nearly half of people say they’ve had arguments at home about what kind of plastics can and can’t be recycled, according to a report by the BBC. Part of the trouble is that there is no legislation covering the recycling symbols on labels. There is, for example, the so-called “Mobius loop” – three arrows chasing each other around a triangle. This indicates that an object is capable of being recycled but not that it will necessarily be accepted in all recycling collection systems.
Even worse is the “green dot”, a symbol dreamed up by Klaus T?pfer, Germany’s environment minister in the early 1990s, showing two arrows circling around. This merely indicates that the producer of the item has made a financial contribution towards the recovery and recycling of packaging in Europe. It has absolutely no bearing on whether the item can or will be recycled.
There are also the plastic resin codes with numbers from one to seven indicating what type of plastic the item is made off and the ease with which it can be recycled. For the record, the easiest to recycle are “1”, “2” and “5”, which are polyethylene terephthalate (aka fizzy drinks bottles), high-density polyethylene (milks cartons, shampoo bottles and the like), and polypropylene (margarine tubs and ready meal trays).
“It gets confusing for the average consumer who has absolutely no idea and doesn’t care, and nor should they be expected to care, because they have lives,” says Wayne DeFeo, a sustainability consultant. “People don’t have time to be looking at the bottom of a bottle. We need to make our messaging much more easily understood.”
Nor does it help that different local authorities across the country have different recycling systems and households are therefore asked to wrestle with different numbers of bins depending on their postcode (although this is due to change in March next year following the introduction of supposedly simpler recycling legislation being brought in under the Environment Act 2021).
But, in theory at least, there is absolutely no need for households to separate different plastics. Recycling facilities can use infrared or Raman spectroscopy, which identifies the structural fingerprint of molecules to analyse the plastics and see what they’re made of instantly on the conveyor belt. It’s called optical sorting and has been commercially available for years.
Of course, such technology costs money. Which gets us to the crux of the issue with the recycling of plastic: it’s got less to do with the science and more to do with the economics. The bald fact is that most plastics are incredibly cheap to make. It’s hard to recycle inexpensive materials profitably because the margins are so low. Hence, why every scrap of gold will always be recycled.
“The truth of the matter is that the authorities can’t be bothered,” says Dr Chris DeArmitt, who is widely considered one of the top plastic materials scientists in the world. “The real reason why plastic often doesn’t get recycled is that it’s not worth it.”
The problem is exacerbated because different plastics (there are approximately 40,000 different man-made polymers) must be treated differently. Soft plastics like those that Tesco was trying to recycle can, for example, cause jams in machines that are not designed to handle them. The trick is to install the correct machines. A German company called Papier-Mettler profitably recycles over 100,000 tons of soft plastic a year – demonstrating that it can be done.
The question of who pays for all this is, of course, key. In 2018, the supermarket Iceland announced that it would become “plastic neutral” by the end of 2022 and remove all plastic packaging from its own label range by the end of 2023. But in 2022, Richard Walker, the company’s managing director, candidly admitted neither goal could be hit without passing extra costs on to customers. Given the hypercompetitiveness of the UK grocery industry, he rather wisely chose not to.
Dr Bruce Bratley, a waste management expert and founder of the recycling firm First Mile, says there are two main reasons why lots of the UK’s plastic waste is exported for recycling. Firstly, this country has “stupid rules” that incentivise export over UK processing. And, secondly, we don’t have a regime that promotes domestic plastic recyclers. “The plastic tax has helped, but not enough,” he says. “If we had price stability for secondary plastics we would have a booming UK recycling sector.”
Standard mechanical recycling works for about 90pc of the plastic types we use. And plastics remain “recyclable” whether or not they actually get recycled. The trouble is, it can often cost more to recycle some waste than it does to ship it around the world to be burnt – so that’s what happens instead.
This has become the focus of many pressure groups in recent years. The case being brought against Exxon in the US, for example, alleges it used the “chasing arrows”, which would have given buyers an expectation the products would be recycled if disposed of properly. “The green lobby seems keen to change the definition of ‘recyclable’ from ‘can be recycled’ to ‘is likely to be recycled’ and then get upset when plastics don’t meet their new definition,” says Dr DeArmitt. “But that’s not how language, science or the law works.”
He points out that plastic is “recyclable” in the way that a football is “kickable”. If the football sits there not being kicked, do you blame the football manufacturer or the lazy footballer? (Similarly “littering” is the act perpetrated by the person dropping an item, not the material from which the item is made.)
The solution proposed by most environmental groups is to just ban it altogether. They don’t like plastics because they are made from fossil fuels, ergo they are evil. “This is short-sighted and completely ignores second-order effects,” says Dr DeArmitt. There is a widely held misconception that plastic must be recycled in order to make it green. That’s not true, argues Dr DeArmitt, it already is. Scores of full lifecycle studies have shown that in 93 per cent of packaging cases, plastic is the option with the smallest environmental impact.
For example, a study conducted by Imperial College in 2019 found that replacing plastic on food packaging with alternatives (such as cotton, glass, metal or bioplastics) would on average increase the weight of the packaging by 3.6 times, the energy use by 2.2 times and carbon dioxide emissions by 2.7 times. Paper bags are heavier than plastic bags and so require more fuel to transport. Glass bottles are much heavier than plastic bottles but also take more energy to make in the first place.
What’s more, plastic tends to do a better job. That difficult-to-remove polyethylene shrink wrapping around a cucumber ensures it lasts three times longer than if exposed to the air. Ban it and, all other things being equal, you would have to grow three times as many cucumbers and transport them all from Spain, the Netherlands, Morocco and Greece (the countries from which the UK imports most of this vegetable).
Indeed, if you look at the benefits derived from only three applications for plastic – making cars lighter, providing cheap insulation for homes and reducing food wastage – all the polymers produced by mankind have net a positive impact on the environment. “Yes, plastics are made from fossil fuels and, yes, that means they have a carbon footprint,” says Dr DeArmitt. “But if you only look at the deficit side of the equation you are being dishonest.”
And yet nobody is bothering to disabuse consumers of their misconception that paper and cardboard are better for the environment than plastic. Instead, supermarkets make even more damaging choices to appease erroneous customer preferences. Dr Bratley says that his family eats a lot of crisps so they tend to buy in bulk. “The multipacks used to come in a big plastic bag but now they come in a big cardboard box,” he says. “Guess which has the bigger carbon footprint?”
In 2020, the Green Alliance interviewed insiders at five UK supermarkets and concluded that “a disjointed and potentially counterproductive approach to solving plastic pollution is emerging”. The researchers found that, under pressure from the public to cut plastic usage, companies were switching to cardboard containers, often coated with non-recyclable materials, and bags whose manufacturing created “much higher” emissions of greenhouse gases.
Of course, plastics become even greener if they are recycled. Some packaging is completely unnecessary (there’s really no excuse for putting bananas – nature’s greatest pre-packaged product – in a plastic bag). And, as we approach Halloween, consumers ought to be mindful of not supporting the manufacture of completely useless single-use plastic tat.
However, scientists warn that much of the heated discourse around plastics is really so much displacement activity. Plastics only constitute about 0.5 per cent of the manufactured materials mankind uses. Cement and steel have far bigger carbon footprints. “But instead we’re fetishising plastics and not focusing on what could actually make a difference,” says Dr DeArmitt.
The biggest steps individuals can make to combat climate change would be to drive less, fly less and eat less meat. “But people don’t want to do those things so they walk around carrying an organic cotton tote instead,” says Dr DeArmitt. “It’s virtue signalling and it won’t help save the planet.
“Science says that we can be for the environment, or against plastics, but not both at the same time.”
Additional reporting by Tom Teodorczuk