Latest features Recycling your plastic

Date Published:

02/06/2009

There's still the elephant in the recycling box - a great big plastic shaped one. Nick Gulhane finds out what happens to plastic in the recycling cycle

It's judgement day. That’s a Tuesday on my road, when my neighbours and I get to spy on how much we’re all drinking, who's been buying more easy-to-assemble Swedish furniture (the people opposite) and living off take-aways. Today’s the day the council collects our recycling. I didn’t put mine out last night so have to hand it in to the crew as they pass. Collector 1 tells me my food waste bin stinks and I should get it cleaned, Collector 2 hands back my green box with a number of plastic items remaining untouched, pointing out that they should have been bagged up with my ‘rubbish’ rubbish and not hidden in with my recyclable rubbish.

What’s been returned is all food packaging - cling film, fruit punnets, meat containers, pot noodle pots. The kitchen bin gets emptied most frequently so it's obvious that most of our weekly rubbish is food related. Plastic's only a relatively small amount of this but it’s the one material that causes me the most concern when I shop - it’s made from oil and it’s hard to get rid of. However, they did take the plastic bottles.

The thing about plastic is that there are so many types. The main ones currently recycled are Polyethylene Terephtalate (PET) and High Density Polyethylene (HDPE). Both of these are used to make bottles and their caps. Since we get through millions of these each year it’s an easy item for us to remember to recycle. I decide to call the council to find out what happens to mine.

It’s a complicated business, run where I live by the North London Waste Authority. It used to be that a small team of people would come round and sort my waste into different containers. If that happens to yours, it’ll then go on to a recycling centre where it can be accumulated with other similar material before going onto a processing plant. Nowadays my dry recyclables (plastic bottles, cardboard, paper, glass and metals) all get slung into the back of a cart together. This is so called ‘co-mingled’ waste gets sent to a Materials Recycling Facility at Greenwich. Here’s where it’s sorted, crushed and baled into different types before heading off to be melted, smelted or re-formed.

Dagenham Docks. Unloved and industrial, it’s the perfect place to set up a plastic recycling plant. I’ve come to meet Chris Dow, an Australian businessman who founded Closed Loop. Dow has an impressive track record in recycling having been involved in helping to make the Sydney Olympics a carbon neutral event where all plastics used, from signs to coffee cups, were from recycled materials and recycled or reused afterwards. As we stand talking, he’s even prising out a few rogue aluminium cans that have made it into the plastic bales.

Inside the factory a surprisingly dank earthy odour permeates - with a note of orange peel. What I’m witnessing is millions of pounds of hi-tech investment that sees the crushed bottles travel at high speed along conveyor belts passing through scanners that can detect wrong ‘uns like sweet wrappers, different coloured plastic and metallic objects. Chris’s big bugbear is PVC. Just tiny amounts can cause blockages in filters or leave tiny opaque marks that can ruin the final product.

Plastics are recycled into all sorts of things - from road signs to clothing. What’s unique about this factory is its ability to take waste that has been gathering all sorts of bacteria in people’s recycling boxes, rolling around the back of dust carts and on the floors of huge recycling centres and create a pristine raw material that meets the high standards demanded by food retailers.

So far Coca Cola, Britvic and Marks and Spencer have approved it for their packaging. The loop is closed. For Chris, the more plastic bottles we use, the better. People shouldn’t beat themselves up about buying bottled drinks - he can recycle them back into bottles at a lower financial and environmental cost then making new ones from oil. His other key point is that packaging designers need to get with the game. He shows me a crushed bottle with its label intact. From its design, it’s clearly an expensive product and even says the bottle’s recyclable. Only it has a metal lid and that means it’s been picked out by the scanner and dumped in the waste pile. No good unless you’re going to pay someone to undo metal lids all day.

Closed Loop recycles 35,000 tonnes of PET and HDPE plastic. It’s still way short of what we do use and either send to landfill or to other countries to be recycled. There’s also the question of the other types of plastic used to cover food that isn’t currently recycled. That loop's still wide open.

Cooking again. Slashing open a pack of lamb mince and emptying out the rest of a tub of mushrooms, I can feel that sense of despair rising again as the empty plastic shapes jostle for space in my waste box. Short of being a self-sufficient vegetarian, this is the way it is for even the keenest recycler. Do I feel better for knowing that some of the plastic waste I create is recyclable? Of course I do, but what about the plastic that isn’t? What about the plastic plates and forks used at a kid's party, or a polystyrene coffee cup?

It’s a complex issue that covers everything from the price of oil to changing manufacturing, from supplying demand to encouraging new technology. There’s no doubting the brilliance of plastic but as it begins its inevitable accumulation in my bin, if we were clever enough to invent it, surely the best thing is to make packaging out of the plastic we recycle the most?

Read Charlie Cottrell from 4Food's blog on cutting down packaging waste

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