Why not just recycle?

This question has been on my mind lately. It’s what we’ve always been taught - recycle, recycle, recycle! Surely it doesn’t matter if I use a whole load of plastic products, as long as I put the plastic in the recycling bin after. Right?

Well, as I’ve looked into this plastic waste thing, I’ve discovered that it does matter. I mean, it really does matter. So, I thought I’d better educate myself as to why. Here are a few things I found and a few of my thoughts on them…

1. Reducing > recycling. If you don’t use something (or reuse another thing), no waste is produced. And producing no waste has to be better than producing some waste. Even if that waste is recyclable, something has to happen to process it and that something will take energy and will have an environmental impact.

2. Recycling may not be the solution it seems. Only 9% of the plastic in recycle bins gets recycled. 9%! The rest just becomes waste sitting in landfills, or making its way to the ocean. There are over 50 types of plastic and it’s not easy to separate them for recycling. Whether or not they can be sorted for recycling depends on the equipment available in the area. So, 91% of the plastic we may think is being recycled is actually building up and taking hundreds of years to disappear.

3. I don’t have a clue what can be recycled! I’ve recently realised this. I look for the symbols on containers etc., but I’ve realised that I don’t really know what the symbols mean! Arrows are good right? Well, I thought this symbol meant it could be recycled.

Apparently not. All it means is that the producer has made some sort of commitment to recycling packaging in Europe. Here is a handy website to see what the symbols mean and therefore what can be recycled: www.recyclenow.com/recycling-knowledge/packaging-symbols-explained

4. The recycling industry is driven by prices (as most things are). When the price of oil drops, the cost of making new plastic is lower than the cost of recycling old plastic, so it’s not worth it for some companies.

5. Plastic cannot be recycled over and over. The process has a shelf life, after which the plastic will go into landfill, where it may remain for nearly 500 years.

6. Like so many things, the recycling industry is not free from politics, corruption and laziness. I don’t like to be that person who is automatically cynical about systems and corporations, but the reality is, waste is a problem and passing that problem on is not a solution.

7. In the UK, we produce around 1.1kg of recycled material per person per day. This is more than the UK has the capacity to recycle, so simply, we need to produce less.

8. Our waste gets shipped overseas. UK recycling, because we can’t deal with it, goes to China or Malaysia or Indonesia. By shifting the responsibility, we have no control over what happens to it when it gets there.

These things have made me think twice. I’m not saying don’t recycle. If it’s a choice between putting it in your recycle bin and your waste bin, you know where to put it, but long term, we need an alternative. It may take a while, it may not be perfect, but I think the solution has to be to buy less plastic in the first place.

Reduce > recycle.

For more detail, written with more eloquence, see these articles:

Plastic recycling is a myth: here’s what really happens to your rubbish.

Plastic we think we’ve recycled could still end up in a landfill. Here’s how.