Surprise! Our recycling is not recycled

[CoolHands]

It’s all sent to turkey and dumped / burnt. Who could have seen this coming? After the bales and containers that ended up in Malaysia as found a couple of years ago, and Indonesia, now its here.

It’s clear the recycling thing / separating our rubbish out as good citizens is total bullst.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57139474

[Chainsaw Rebuild]

There was a PH member who works in recycling who made an interesting post on why these kind of reports are misleading and explained how it really is. Hopefully he will be along soon.

[df76]

CoolHands said:

It’s all sent to turkey and dumped / burnt. Who could have seen this coming? After the bales and containers that ended up in Malaysia as found a couple of years ago, and Indonesia, now its here.

It’s clear the recycling thing / separating our rubbish out as good citizens is total bullst.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57139474

It's not "all", but it's about 10% of our plastic waste and still a disgrace that it's not dealt with properly. There are a number of projects to increase our own capacity to deal with our own plastic waste correctly, a processing plant at Avonmouth opened last year.

[boyse7en]

Its a surprise to you that some companies act illegally, cut corners and lie in order to maximize their profits?

[CoolHands]

df76 said:

It's not "all", but it's about 10% of our plastic waste and still a disgrace that it's not dealt with properly. There are a number of projects to increase our own capacity to deal with our own plastic waste correctly, a processing plant at Avonmouth opened last year.

10%? 40%. And that’s just turkey

I’d be amazed if 25% of our recycling is genuinely recycled.

[df76]

CoolHands said:

10%? 40%. And that’s just turkey

I’d be amazed if 25% of our recycling is genuinely recycled.

Nope, you’ve read it wrong. 40% of the waste that we export goes to turkey. We generate approx 2.2 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, 210,000 tonnes of that went to turkey.

[RicksAlfas]

df76 said:

We generate approx 2.2 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, 210,000 tonnes of that went to turkey.

The balance is stored in various old industrial units around the country to be set on fire at a later date.

[Getragdogleg]

RicksAlfas said:

df76 said:

We generate approx 2.2 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, 210,000 tonnes of that went to turkey.

The balance is stored in various old industrial units around the country to be set on fire at a later date.

To be fair I think that's mostly just tyres...

[XCP]

I strongly suspect that all the 'wood' pile at the recycling centre goes straight to landfill.

[emicen]

I would be fascinated to see how the reality figures look for this year.

My local council's covid response at its dumps recycling centres, has been to restrict the number of vehicles getting access and confine everyone to a single bay for their unloading. So rather than parking and being able to dump your waste in to skips for garden, wood, plastics, rubble, bulky, general etc, you now dump it all in to bagged or unbagged.

Meanwhile, the cardboard specific compacter is taped off, along with the glass, batteries and used oil section.

The impact will be enormous, and completely unnecessary. You don't go to the dump to rub shoulders with other people, if its not possible to just operate social distancing and function completely normally in all other respects then we really are in a dark place as a supposedly educated society.

[Evoluzione]

XCP said:

I strongly suspect that all the 'wood' pile at the recycling centre goes straight to landfill.

But at least it's biodegradable, so if it goes to landfill it isn't much of an issue.
The same goes for the packaging of a Mcdonalds meal, if you take-out then only the bag is recyclable, if you eat in then none of it is.
Cup aside, It is however biodegradable so it's not that bad. The same goes for pizza and fish n chip boxes, they can't be recycled even though it says so on the box.
The reason? The cardboard is contaminated with food and grease.
Same goes for oven/microwave meal containers so the plastic ones there a bit of a problem.

Edited by Evoluzione on Tuesday 18th May 09:16

[XCP]

Cue massive increase in fly tipping.

[spookly]

Could they not just melt down the various plastics into some mutant hybrid plastic, mix it with aggregate and hardener and put it in potholes?

The most annoying thing in all this is that we seem to have jumped to the last step of reduce, reuse, recycle. Why don't we see more refillable/reusable containers and filling points in stores? People can't buy what isn't offered. I'd happily refill things in store rather than continually be taking home plastic crap filled with products. You could buy shower gel by the litre like petrol, swipe phone/card by and fill it up.

Recycling is important, but if we want to fix the plastic problem, we need to be a bit more imaginative than looking at recycling to solve the problem.

[StevieBee]

CoolHands said:

It’s clear the recycling thing / separating our rubbish out as good citizens is total bullst.

No it's not.

This is my thing so buckle up....

To start with, you have to think of recycling as a commodity. Like all commodities it's sold to those that have need for it. The revenue that generates ultimately reduces the cost of local waste services. It can cost up to around £190 a tonne to tip a tonne of waste into landfill in the UK - roughly the same amount produced by each home with each home contributing around £60 - £80 a year for the provision of waste services (including litter picking, parks, crematoria, etc). The comparative cost for recycling is around £40 per tonne.

So who buys it? Large scale manufacturers mainly, most of whom tend to be in Asia, South Eastern Europe (including Turkey) and South America. Half of all UK recycling is done via export and is worth around £4b to the UK economy annually.

Like all commodities, the price (and acceptability) is dependant upon the quality of that commodity. If the material that arrives at a destination doesn't match the required quality, the buyer either pays a lower price or rejects it. If the latter, it would be impractical to send it back so is disposed of locally.

However, waste management is largely poorly or completely unregulated in these countries so when it gets disposed of, it tends to end up in dumpsites rather than landfill. This is not ideal but such regions have informal recyclers - you might refer to them as scavengers - teams of people that collect valuable materials from these dumpsites and sell on. Some of them are highly efficient and highly advanced in their operations.

But when journalists and activists visit these places without knowledge of these issues, what they see is British waste dumped in foreign lands and a narrative emerges that this is the norm when in fact it represents such a small part of the whole as to be almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. But it makes a good story that supports a narrative which is itself often flawed.

The problem exists in the lack of regulation in the destination countries. Those who buy the recycling are seldom controlled and can change their minds whilst the material is en-route. These countries lack the capacity to address this which is why the international development and aid community fund people like me to go to those places and assist in the reforms necessary to enable more efficient recyclate trading between the two countries.

[Biker 1]

Correct.
I purchased 2 miniature cauliflowers from Sainsburys the other day. Plastic packaging was twice as heavy as the actual veg - surely there is a way to reduce the plastic at source?

[Sheepshanks]

spookly said:

Could they not just melt down the various plastics into some mutant hybrid plastic, mix it with aggregate and hardener and put it in potholes?

Like this? https://macrebur.com/

[bristolbaron]

Refillable is starting to become a thing, buts it’s a long way from being the norm. A friend of mine has expanded from one to three shops in Bristol in the last couple of years, hopefully more to come!

https://preservefoods.co.uk/

[gazza285]

Are we not sending it to Turkey to be recycled?

[Evoluzione]

Biker 1 said:

Correct.
I purchased 2 miniature cauliflowers from Sainsburys the other day. Plastic packaging was twice as heavy as the actual veg - surely there is a way to reduce the plastic at source?

Buy the unwrapped ones.

[ChocolateFrog]

CoolHands said:

It’s all sent to turkey and dumped / burnt. Who could have seen this coming? After the bales and containers that ended up in Malaysia as found a couple of years ago, and Indonesia, now its here.

It’s clear the recycling thing / separating our rubbish out as good citizens is total bullst.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57139474

I thought it was common knowledge.

Sticking all my recycling in one bin I'm under no illusion that the local authority is then recycling it properly.

Edited by ChocolateFrog on Tuesday 18th May 10:05