The reason recycling does NOT work
By: Adam Mckenna
Tags: Recycling, Climate Change, Environment, Plastic Waste, Pollution

How recycling really works.

“The symbol,” Erin Rhoads writes in her book Waste Not, “simply means that the material can be recycled or that it has recycled content in it. Many of the items we send off for recycling are merely one product away from landfill.”

Some items, such as metal tins, can be recycled indefinitely. But most ‘recyclable’ products can only be recycled a handful of times before they reach end-of-life. Paper and cardboard, for instance, can only be recycled up-to ten times.

But at least at the end of its life, paper decomposes. (Yes, although this mostly happens in a landfill, which is far from ideal).

Alas, paper is not the item that appears most often in our waste bins.

The award goes to plastic.

Plastic wraps neigh-on everything we buy, from fruit and ready-meals, to perfume and games consoles.

If plastic hasn’t been used to wrap the product, it has likely been used in some capacity. Whether as windows on pasta boxes; lining for takeaway coffee cups or glue for teabags. The list is endless.

The problem is that plastic can only be recycled a couple of times before it is “down-cycled”. In other words, sent to the landfill.

That’s if it can be recycled at all. Have a look at the food product is your kitchen. Most items will have “not currently recycled” written on the back.

Those plastics could be recycled to some extent, but because it’s not cost-effective to do so, they’re instead sent to a landfill where they’ll remain for hundreds of years.

As Martin Dorey put it:

[businesses] are concerned with business and the business of being popular, with little appetite to act decisively, especially if it means damaging the bottom line.

Are we destined to live in a world where plastic pollution continues to grow?

Is there hope?

If you browse online, you may be forgiven for believing the situation is improving.

For instance, several countries have launched initiatives to recycle soft plastics — i.e. carrier bags, bubble wrap, freezer bags, bread bags, etc.

Though this categorisation includes only a handful of items, and these items too can only be recycled a few times, at we’re making progress.

Or so I believed.

These items cannot be recycled at home. In the UK, you need to take your soft plastics to specific locations — supermarkets, recycling centres, etc.

As I’ve recently been making a conscious effort to address my own waste, I spent the last two weeks gathering up any and all soft plastics in my household, sparing them from the regular waste bin.

In the end, I had filled a large paper bag with bread bags, bubble wrap, and all the rest of it.

I read online that my local supermarket had the facilities to recycle soft plastics. It was strange, though. I have shopped at the supermarket for years, and I’d never noticed those facilities before.

Were they somewhere I had just never visited? Perhaps tucked away behind the building, perhaps?

At any rate, I arrived and searched for them to no avail.

All I found were several large mixed-recycling bins in the car-park. Five of them were lined up in a row, and each bin’s lid had been propped up by a mountain of rubbish that overflowed, littering the ground around them.

The assortment of rubbish dumped in them ranged from ready-meal wrappers to computer keyboards — most of which was not “mixed recycling”. They had in effect been converted into regular bins.

And there was no bin for soft plastics.

So, I asked a member of the staff. The man, clearly a veteran of the supermarket who had seen it all, leaned in with his towards me as I spoke.

I asked him, ‘do you have facilities to recycle carrier bags?’

‘We used to,’ he said, a tinge of defeat in his voice, ‘don’t anymore.’

‘That’s weird. I read online you do. What happened?’ I asked.

‘Well, they used to just take the plastic from the recycling bin and dump it in the regular bin,’ he said as he continued his work.

‘If we still had them,’ he continued, ‘[your plastic] would just get dumped. Just find yourself a regular bin and put them in there.’

Then it dawned on me.

The real reason recycling doesn’t work

In my household, I’m constantly battling with my housemates to make sure they recycle their waste properly.

They’re only human, after all, and they don’t share my passion for the environment. They’ll occasionally put paper, tins or glass in the regular bin.

And I once found a half-eaten Sunday roast on top of the recycling.

But that’s at home. I had hoped at least that once the recycling waste was in the “system”, it would be dealt with properly.

After all, the supermarkets and stores all happily publish webpages that showcase their efforts to become more sustainable.

The supermarket in question boasts on its website that they “protect and conserve the world around us through sustainable practises and initiatives.”

Why shouldn’t we believe them?

We shouldn’t believe them because it is people, not policy, that runs the supermarkets. Humans, just like you and me.

And not just supermarkets — waste facilities, rubbish collection, councils and governments. All is whim to the folly of humanity.

And if those people don’t care, are not interested, or simply don’t know any better, then they will do what people do.

They take the path of least resistance.

Dale Carnegie once wrote, ‘there is only one way under high heaven to get anybody to do anything … and that is by making the other person want to do it.’

If people in households don’t understand the impact of waste, or don’t care, then they won’t bother with recycling.

The same logic applies to the workers at supermarkets.

They’re grafting away, hauling trollies, listening to customer’s silly questions (mine included), and all the rest of it. And all for minimum wage.

If they don’t care about the environment — for whatever reason — they’ll take the path of least resistance. And that might mean going against any systems that have been implemented.

Imagine, for instance, that you’re a worker at your local supermarket. You go to empty the recycling bins, as you’ve been asked to. But when you look inside them, they’re full of God-knows what random waste: half-eaten sandwiches, rotten food packaging, moulding fruit, old clothes, etc.

Are you going to sort through it?

Nobody wants to do that. Maybe if you were particularly passionate about the environment. But we can’t expect that for everyone. We shouldn’t expect it from anyone.

People cannot be expected to follow systems unless they want to.

So, what’s the solution?

C onclusion: the alternative

If we want to stop plastic waste, we can’t rely on people to just not buy products that use plastic, and we can’t rely on them to recycle it properly, nor on the systems that process that waste.

Even if people could be trusted recycle properly 100% of the time, it wouldn’t be a real fix — and in practice, they don’t. (And who knows what goes on later in the recycling journey?)

No — to stem the tide of plastic waste, we need to stop it at the source.

We need to encourage businesses and producers to cut it out of their workflows.

We need to encourage brands to find alternatives.

We need legislation to levy fees for irresponsible plastic pollution.

This problem isn’t going away.

Let’s not hold the consumers who have no choice but to accept this horrible reality to account.

Let’s instead hold to account the people who are responsible for pumping out this waste into the world. The people who enable it, without hesitation, and all in the name of larger profit margins and “the bottom line”.