The right hand side is true (the recycling symbol, for example, is notoriously useless), but these days we do have many plastics that can be recycled and/or are actually biodegradable, though obviously there are asterisks to both. Enzymes have also been recently found and engineered to break down many common plastics. So do recycle!
To my understanding recycling household plastics these days mostly sucks because (1) even though there’s fewer varieties now and they’re generally more recycleable, there’s still a very wide spectrum of different chemistries that goes into all the packagings and automatically sorting them out is non-trivial, and (2) a lot of household plastics like food packaging is dirty and washing it uses more resources than just making a new package and burning (or more recently, composting) the old one does.
Also, good news: the widely reported “spoon’s worth of microplastics in your brain” thing actually isn’t really true.
Disclaimer up front, I work in waste treatment (EU), and at work we separate waste for recycling, we burn waste, we compost organic waste, we operate organic digesters and we operate land fills. Also, I’m rambling in the text below.
So regarding separation of packaging waste, it’s doable. Automated separating works pretty reliable, and we can get plastics like PET out of the waste at 98+% purity. Second biggest problem is stuff that doesn’t belong in the stream to be separated, people throwing stuff in the wrong bins. Biggest problem however is money and the politics behind it. Since oil companies are higly subsidized, and plastic producers are closely related, so called virgin plastics are dirt cheap. They’re so cheap, that plastic manufacterors are finding novel ways to use plastics every day where ther really is no need to use them. I mean stuff like cookies invidually wrapped in plastics and then packaged by 6 or 8 in tray which is wrapped in plastic. At some point all this stuff gets thrown away, and my employer comes and the plastics then need to be separated from the other waste. This costs money, and the gate fee for waste doesn’t cover this, it’s cheaper to burn the waste and produce energy from the generated heat. It would be even cheaper to put the waste in a landfill, but there’s laws against that, today only stuff that can’t be handled in any other way is allowed to go to landfills where I live.
So who pays for this? The government! In the EU countries have all kinds of environmental ruling, which are translated into laws for every country. The countries could basically rule that the producer of polluting materials have to pay for the clean up, but then you’re threatening oil companies, so the lobby industry dealt with that. Same goes for plastic producers. Now all that’s left is waste treatment companies and civilians. The waste treatment companies aren’t in the business to lose money, so it comes to the civilians. Of course it’s hard to sell to the people that they need to pay for all of this, so how do you deal with this? You start a semi-government company to handle the separation and recycling with subsidies for the companies doing it. So far so good. So where does it go down hill? Well, where everything goes wrong!
In general, the semi-government company (SGC for brevity) gets his money from the government, and pays the for profit companies to do the job. To check if requirements are met, the SGC’s budget is controlled, and the allmighty god of metrics is summoned to check if everything is running ok. The metrics turn into KPI’s, and KPI’s will become their own goal. So the SGC now has goals it needs to reach to get funding, and it will work to meet these goals. It does so by introducing lots of different KPI’s througout the waste management chain, and (for example) in the process allow the waste collector to mix in industrial waste into household plastic waste to get more volume, snce this is a metric by the government. Then the seperation plant has to put in more effort into their process generating more reject and a less pure end product, which gets harder to recycle. Meanwhile the SGC gets a lot of slack from the government for not meeting its targets.
All in all a big wall of text which seems to go nowhere. However, my opinion is, if laws would be made to reduce plastic up front and to tax companies for envornmental impact, the waste industry wouldn’t need to be as convoluted as it is. It would would mean less virgin plastics produced which leads to less demand for recycling. I’d still have a job since waste will always be around, but the fossil industry and the money behind it might take a hit.
This is fascinating! Do you have any numbers on how much of the plastic that is put into recycling bins is actually getting recycled? I’ve read very low numbers like 3 - 10 % but don’t know if accurate or still up to date.
That’s an interesting question! My first reaction was “I’m not sure, but definitely more than 50%”, but then I remembered that’s the yield of our separation plant. I’ll try to find some numbers on recovery percentages this week and update this post to give a general idea.
Once it leaves our plant, it should be recycled at high yields, because otherwise no one would bother since reworking plastic waste to raw materials takes lots of energy. And like I said, virgin plastics are dirt cheap. Some first considerations; we extract plastics like PET, PP (solid), PE (solid and film) as mono streams for higher end recycling, and a stream of mixed plastics containing all of the previous for low value recycling. There are other outputs like ferrous and non-ferrous metals, milk cartons and residual material.
Interesting! Yeah, please update / comment if you find anything.
Uhhhh, I’d be veeeery interested in knowing percentages for recycling of Tetra pak style packaging. Their website makes it sound like it’s super easy to recycle them but I’d think it would be almost impossible to get this glued together mess of paper, plastic and other stuff recycled (I’d love to be wrong about that, obviously). I also read somewhere that there’s like one plant in the UK that can actually recycle these but no idea if that is accurate.
So I looked up the numbers. The packaging waste is collected as a mix of plastics, drinking cartons and metals. When collected it’s about 42.6% plastics, 8.3% cartons and 6.3% metal, the rest is residual waste. The sorting plant then recovers 39.3% plastics, 7.1% cartons and 5.9% metal which means over all more than 90% recovered. The plastics are recovered about 66% into mono streams like PET or PP. The other 34% is recovered as mixed plastics, which can be recycled for low value stuff.
I have no idea how Tetra pak is recycled to be honest, my guess is probably by dissolving the paper in water and burning the plastic/aluminium. A coworker of mine once looked into shredding them and feeding them to an anorganic digester in order to produce biogas. According to him it gave some nice gas yields in the lab tests.
I’ll fetch some general numbers on raw material recovery tomorrow and report back.
The right hand side is true (the recycling symbol, for example, is notoriously useless), but these days we do have many plastics that can be recycled and/or are actually biodegradable, though obviously there are asterisks to both. Enzymes have also been recently found and engineered to break down many common plastics. So do recycle!
To my understanding recycling household plastics these days mostly sucks because (1) even though there’s fewer varieties now and they’re generally more recycleable, there’s still a very wide spectrum of different chemistries that goes into all the packagings and automatically sorting them out is non-trivial, and (2) a lot of household plastics like food packaging is dirty and washing it uses more resources than just making a new package and burning (or more recently, composting) the old one does.
Also, good news: the widely reported “spoon’s worth of microplastics in your brain” thing actually isn’t really true.
Disclaimer up front, I work in waste treatment (EU), and at work we separate waste for recycling, we burn waste, we compost organic waste, we operate organic digesters and we operate land fills. Also, I’m rambling in the text below.
So regarding separation of packaging waste, it’s doable. Automated separating works pretty reliable, and we can get plastics like PET out of the waste at 98+% purity. Second biggest problem is stuff that doesn’t belong in the stream to be separated, people throwing stuff in the wrong bins. Biggest problem however is money and the politics behind it. Since oil companies are higly subsidized, and plastic producers are closely related, so called virgin plastics are dirt cheap. They’re so cheap, that plastic manufacterors are finding novel ways to use plastics every day where ther really is no need to use them. I mean stuff like cookies invidually wrapped in plastics and then packaged by 6 or 8 in tray which is wrapped in plastic. At some point all this stuff gets thrown away, and my employer comes and the plastics then need to be separated from the other waste. This costs money, and the gate fee for waste doesn’t cover this, it’s cheaper to burn the waste and produce energy from the generated heat. It would be even cheaper to put the waste in a landfill, but there’s laws against that, today only stuff that can’t be handled in any other way is allowed to go to landfills where I live.
So who pays for this? The government! In the EU countries have all kinds of environmental ruling, which are translated into laws for every country. The countries could basically rule that the producer of polluting materials have to pay for the clean up, but then you’re threatening oil companies, so the lobby industry dealt with that. Same goes for plastic producers. Now all that’s left is waste treatment companies and civilians. The waste treatment companies aren’t in the business to lose money, so it comes to the civilians. Of course it’s hard to sell to the people that they need to pay for all of this, so how do you deal with this? You start a semi-government company to handle the separation and recycling with subsidies for the companies doing it. So far so good. So where does it go down hill? Well, where everything goes wrong!
In general, the semi-government company (SGC for brevity) gets his money from the government, and pays the for profit companies to do the job. To check if requirements are met, the SGC’s budget is controlled, and the allmighty god of metrics is summoned to check if everything is running ok. The metrics turn into KPI’s, and KPI’s will become their own goal. So the SGC now has goals it needs to reach to get funding, and it will work to meet these goals. It does so by introducing lots of different KPI’s througout the waste management chain, and (for example) in the process allow the waste collector to mix in industrial waste into household plastic waste to get more volume, snce this is a metric by the government. Then the seperation plant has to put in more effort into their process generating more reject and a less pure end product, which gets harder to recycle. Meanwhile the SGC gets a lot of slack from the government for not meeting its targets.
All in all a big wall of text which seems to go nowhere. However, my opinion is, if laws would be made to reduce plastic up front and to tax companies for envornmental impact, the waste industry wouldn’t need to be as convoluted as it is. It would would mean less virgin plastics produced which leads to less demand for recycling. I’d still have a job since waste will always be around, but the fossil industry and the money behind it might take a hit.
This is fascinating! Do you have any numbers on how much of the plastic that is put into recycling bins is actually getting recycled? I’ve read very low numbers like 3 - 10 % but don’t know if accurate or still up to date.
That’s an interesting question! My first reaction was “I’m not sure, but definitely more than 50%”, but then I remembered that’s the yield of our separation plant. I’ll try to find some numbers on recovery percentages this week and update this post to give a general idea.
Once it leaves our plant, it should be recycled at high yields, because otherwise no one would bother since reworking plastic waste to raw materials takes lots of energy. And like I said, virgin plastics are dirt cheap. Some first considerations; we extract plastics like PET, PP (solid), PE (solid and film) as mono streams for higher end recycling, and a stream of mixed plastics containing all of the previous for low value recycling. There are other outputs like ferrous and non-ferrous metals, milk cartons and residual material.
Interesting! Yeah, please update / comment if you find anything.
Uhhhh, I’d be veeeery interested in knowing percentages for recycling of Tetra pak style packaging. Their website makes it sound like it’s super easy to recycle them but I’d think it would be almost impossible to get this glued together mess of paper, plastic and other stuff recycled (I’d love to be wrong about that, obviously). I also read somewhere that there’s like one plant in the UK that can actually recycle these but no idea if that is accurate.
So I looked up the numbers. The packaging waste is collected as a mix of plastics, drinking cartons and metals. When collected it’s about 42.6% plastics, 8.3% cartons and 6.3% metal, the rest is residual waste. The sorting plant then recovers 39.3% plastics, 7.1% cartons and 5.9% metal which means over all more than 90% recovered. The plastics are recovered about 66% into mono streams like PET or PP. The other 34% is recovered as mixed plastics, which can be recycled for low value stuff.
I have no idea how Tetra pak is recycled to be honest, my guess is probably by dissolving the paper in water and burning the plastic/aluminium. A coworker of mine once looked into shredding them and feeding them to an anorganic digester in order to produce biogas. According to him it gave some nice gas yields in the lab tests.
I’ll fetch some general numbers on raw material recovery tomorrow and report back.