The secret life of your recycling: where does it go after the bin?

UK households are pretty good at recycling; 44.1% of us recycle. This is mostly plastic, cardboard, and paper known as dry recyclables, but only 12% is actually recycled after it is taken away from us. It should be easy to recycle dry materials, so what happens once they go to the recycling plant?

Here’s the rundown for plastic 👇

Now, what if I told you that 60% of all the plastic we put in our recycling bins to be recycled ends up in the incinerator to be burned? The problem is single-use plastic with labels, such as water bottles, yogurt pots, and food containers, actually isn’t recyclable. There is nothing the recycling plant can do to separate the clean and unclean plastic as well the multi-layers of plastic from each other in order to use the main container. The technology isn’t available, and it is not cost-effective to do this with millions of tonnes of plastic, so they just burn it. This releases toxic gasses and chemicals into the atmosphere. In terms of greenhouse gasses, burning plastic is probably one of the worst things you can do, and we do it a lot since the waste per person is going up (from 399kg per person in 2020 to 409kg in 2021).

There are some helpful tips you can do individually to help:

• Cleaning and drying your food containers thoroughly before putting in the recycling bin

• Take the labels off your plastic if you can (bottles, etc) before putting it in your recycling bin

• Check the rules of your local council (on your councils website) and the recycling plant they use; it will save time/effort of them sorting the non-eligible plastic

• Try to reduce your single plastic use in general

That being said, there is a much bigger problem with the recycling system. The majority is ineligible, and the rest is sent to another country to be “reused.” For the UK, this is mostly Malaysia, Turkey, Poland and Indonesia. It used to be China until they decided they will no longer accept plastic that isn’t 99% pure. From this point, I don’t have any real data or evidence about what happens. We can assume some will probably be recycled for manufacturing goods, but the majority probably ends up in a landfill in Southeast Asia.

A lot of this is outside of our control; the government should set targets for companies to get rid of the ineligible single-use plastic in our food packaging and other goods but also for recycling plants/companies to come up with better solutions than just burning or selling the waste/plastic to another country. The circular economy, eliminating waste by reusing, sharing, and recycling for as long as possible, is a more sustainable model of consumption (will cover this in full in another article). The current system is terrible, and it’s a shame we sort our rubbish for only 12% (probably less) to actually be recycled. I don’t have the answer, but I know we could do better.

The green scene this week:

59% of global executives admitted to corporate greenwashing in a google survey

Apple will use 100% recycled cobalt batteries by 2025

Scientist have found a way to reverse aging in new study