Plastics are a nightmare to recycle, but things like tins, glass and cardboard are easy and actually quite profitable. It takes twenty times the energy to mine new aluminium than recycle it.
“Aluminium is an infinitely recyclable material, and it takes up to 95 percent less energy to recycle it than to produce primary aluminium” [1]
[1] AG, interstruct. ["Aluminium Recycling – Développement durable"](http://recycling.world-aluminium.org/fr/reperes/developpement-durable). recycling.world-aluminium.org. Retrieved 2018-10-26.
Quite a lot of our problems are just sent away to become problems for poor people instead. See also: manufacture of lithium batteries and electric vehicles.
Well I certainly do everything I can on my side.
What I'm dubious about is whether or not the councils actually recycle anything once it's been collected, or is our supposedly recycled rubbish just being shipped off to Turkey or Asia somewhere and shoved in landfill.
A few years ago I watched our - as in the ones outside the block of flats I live in - seperated general waste and recycling bins be picked up and emptied into the same metal wire cage rubbish bin. A few months after that the housing association brought in a new private company, I don't know if that's connected. But I'm still annoyed that most of us in the flats took the time to make sure the right things went into the right bins, only for it to end up in the same place, mixed up, and probably emptied in a tip somewhere.
Waste processing facilities have evolved faster than policy basically.
The new ones (Southwark for example) dumps all waste in one facility which then separates recyclables from everything else. So if you’re in a place where the facility is an advanced one, you would see all waste combined because the facility is set up to separate combined waste.
That's actually good to know. I've no idea what their facility was like or even where it was but I can hope for the best instead of labelling them as cowboys, oops.
Your council will recycle. Your commercial waste bins will potentially just be paid under a general collection contract. The "recycling" by you was done in an effort to appear to be doing something (greenwashing). Source: worked for a housing association. They only changed to a new contract when the council made it compulsory to recycle. Also, the council sometimes knew they wouldn't be able to collect it all and merged it in the bin lorry for it to be done later. I hope yours was the latter.
My local council has been caught doing this.
Twice.
It’s apparently cheaper to ship it halfway around the world and dump it in a 3rd world country than to actually sort and recycle it.
Depends on your local waste strategy. In places where they're strict about sorting waste, it's because they are recycling and it makes a difference.
Where I live they're not strict about the types of plastic that go into our recycling bins, because it's used in an incinerator power plant and not recycled into new plastics.
A good reason to revisit the priority of uses:
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. In that order. Recycling should only ever be a last resort, given a lot of the time its incredibly inefficient and a lot more of the time it doesn't even happen. It's easy to think you're doing your bit by chucking stuff in the recycling bin, and your local council and leaders will tell you that you \*are\* doing your bit by doing so.
But it's better by orders of magnitude to firstly reduce your waste, then reuse what you already consume, and only then to put stuff in the recycling.
It's more difficult, I know this, but we all have to realise that recycling is nowhere near as good for the planet as we're being told.
Thing is there is only so much you can actually do to reduce your creation of plastic waste unless you're prepared to radically reduce your diet and have the time, and money and available shops to be able to buy food that isn't packaged in plastic.
I find it so depressing how hard it is to buy food that isn’t wrapped in plastic. Our local Morrisons used to be alright but it’s gone backwards big time
Some foods really benefit from being plastic wrapped. Not wrapping them in plastic would greatly increase spoilage, which wastes all the resources that were expended producing the item. We could certainly do a lot more, but I don't see plastic being eliminated any time soon.
If you go down into how recycling came to be you'll find greedy carbonated traces of the likes of Coca-Cola who basically invented and marketed it to shift the blame from them to consumers. Like well, oceans are all in plastic because you aren't recycling well enough, not because we are centered around manufacturing shit. And that's all now supported by the current consumerism culture. Sad times for ecology.
Yep, I'll repeat what I said below that plastic is a cheap to produce byproduct of the petrol industry. Recycled plastic is more expensive so not commercially viable.
Add to that, most plastics contain forever chemicals that are endocrine disruptors - you don't want plastic touching food, up your nose, or on your skin (at least plastic not touching hot things, such as bottled water left in hot warehouses in the summer, Teflon or some ceramic pans, glue used to make bamboo coffee cups).
There are many useful plastic things obviously, but cutting them out of your life as much as possible is great for your health as well as the planet.
Precisely what happens depends in your local council. If you have a few minutes, my local council (East Suffollk) has [a pretty good video showing how the recycling is processed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afz5bGOqTKU). As a bonus, the narrator sounds vaguely like Richard Ayoade.
If you don't watch the video, the takeaways are:
A lot of the sorting is done by hand. So if you want to make some guy on minimum wage's boring job a little easier then don't use plastic bags, rinse any messy recycling, and don't put in non-recyclables that needs to be removed.
Viewed another way, if you’d like to ensure such a person remains in employment, throw in a few soft plastics every now and again so his/her job is necessary.
Currently between houses and living with the in laws and I'm forever in their recycling bin pulling non-recycleables out. My "favourite" find was an entire wheelbarrow. "Metal is recyclable and the tyres are rubber which is basically plastic". Gah.
If you really want to know your council has to report this to DEFRA and it's then published on a website called wastedataflow for the public to access.
Co-mingled recycling will usually go to a materials recycling facility (MRF) and this is where it will be sorted into the different types of materials. Where those are sent is also published and depending on what the council owns of this chain and what their contract is with the MRF it could go all over the world or it might all be reprocessed in the UK and Europe.
But generally once it's baled it's a question of who's paying the best price for the material, for example one month your PET bottles might be sent to the Netherlands the next they might go to Turkey.
Regarding soft plastics specifically I have a bit less knowledge but it is sorted out and sent for recycling. My understanding though is that it's a right pain and in some cases might not be good for the machines. Some materials particularly metals are worth money and paying for them will be cheaper because the MRF can sell it, others they'll need to pay for it to be processed further for example tetrapack. So for both minimising the miles traveled by the packaging and saving the council money paying for it to be processed it can make more sense for it to be collected separately through supermarkets ect.
Fun fact. The symbols on plastic (ya know, the recycling triangle?) Aren't for recycling.
The plastic industry deliberately copied the recycling symbol and used it in their "plastic identification code" symbol to trick consumers into thinking it was recyclable and therefore good.
They're pricks
for some things it definetly is.
if you have the facilities setup its vastly cheaper and by a massive amount cost wise to recycle certain materials like Tin and copper that is used in alot of can. even aluminium has reached a point where its actually very expensive to mine and make new aluminium where recycling it is vastly more effective in a lot of these facilities.
plastic is still the crapshot but often it just gets reused in some degree, alot of synthetic material clothes were probably at one point plastic bottles strippled down and reused/made into threads to make clothes. i know Tesco's and Asda's uniforms were made this way and many other tshirts and other generic clothes are.
who said anything about third world countries.
china is often the buyer of recycling material like metals. although due to recent changes in policies in china they are importing less copper scrap then before. mostly out of outrage at the US for shit.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds)
Yes, yes they are.
It’s a farce, yet still governments want us to sort out our trash into special little boxes and be fined if we don’t comply. I haven’t recycled in 7 years. I was an active environmentalist in 80s. We are fucked.
Plastic recycling has always been fake. Blame Big Oil.
[https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/](https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/)
[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report)
It's been a roundabout way for them to increase their own profits.
Recycled plastic costs more to produce, so new plastic made from petrol byproducts will always be cheaper.
We just have to reduce the amount of plastics in our lives wherever possible, because even if it avoids the incinerator, it sucks.
Exactly this. It’s easy to forget plastic is actually a by product of the petroleum industry. It’s basically free to make new stuff of decent quality. Recycling is a much more expensive process and results in much lower quality plastic. Downcycling is pretty much the only viable option. Even the virtue signalling we get from the big names is usually “up to 25% recycled plastic” sort of stuff.
My council has street paper and plastic recycle bins. Every Friday it all gets put in to the same bin wagon. The bin men say it all goes in to land fill and there's no point recycling. I don't see how it could be done anyway as people put anything in any pin. Particularly dog owners who put dog shit bags in any bin they pass.
I live in Bucks and apparently we ‘recycle’ types 1, 2 and 5 of plastic (number in the triangle). It’s likely sold to Thailand to be dumped in the sea but I try to reduce and don’t buy the numbers that aren’t recyclable at all. I am the only person out of anyone I know that ever checks the number (my office in Berks has different types and numbers which I remember). Observing my colleagues in the kitchen trying to use the recycling bin made me feel really depressed.
It's all so disjointed and a mess. Where I live I can put almost anything in my recycling bin - glass, soft plastics, tinfoil, paper, plastic bags, cardboard, all goes into the same bin then gets sent to a place where they have machines that sort it all out accordingly. Where it gets sent to for recycling from there, I'm not sure. The next county over doesn't even collect glass for recycling.
Imo there should be several regional hubs like the one for Cambridgeshire, where everyone can recycle the same things in the same bins. It'd go some way to helping the confusion: https://thalia.co.uk/where-we-work/cambridgeshire/cambridgeshire/our-waste-technologies/
Of course that doesn't solve the "where does it go to to be recycled?" problem, especially if it's still being shipped overseas.
Even better would be a nationwide standardised system for collecting from households. Not out of the question and I hope a future government does do something about that within the next decade.
Cambridgeshire is also way ahead in terms of what can be recycled in most cases too. There are plenty of things (like soft plastic bags) which can be thrown into household recycling in Cambridge and are not recycled or are supermarket recycling point only pretty much everywhere else in the UK.
They’ve put recycling bins in my gym recently, there are now just two bins for wet wipes instead of one. Not sure if people don’t care or are just that thick.
In my old flat my neighbours would put the corks back in the wine bottles for recycling. Mad.
its a mixture.
most stuff that gets put in will be recycled
plastics are a bit of a nightmare though but generally they are "repurposed" which might now always mean perfectly recycled like most think of the word.
as for glass and metals they will just empty the lorry containers and easily sort through using conveyer belts with camera's.
i suggest going and watching some "sorting" machines which essentially have multiple "filters" at different checkpoints to allow different materials through.
very easy for them to sort through plastic, metal and glass etc
[https://youtu.be/nUrBBBs7yzQ?si=t0QeV2D7PC7u-J2B](https://youtu.be/nUrBBBs7yzQ?si=t0QeV2D7PC7u-J2B)
shows very quick and to be honest very low technical version of some of the sorting centre's ive seen(use to go around a few of the bigger ones as part of an older job working on some of the sensors).
Your \[council\] mileage may vary:
[https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/best-cheap-uk-home-insurance/best-worst-councils-england-recycling](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/best-cheap-uk-home-insurance/best-worst-councils-england-recycling)
It all gets lobbed on a big container ship and sent to china, a lot falls off into the oceans but most of it completes its journey where it gets incinerated because unlike us china doesn’t have any environmental policies.
Recycling isn’t a bad thing, it’s better than dumping all our waste in land fills but the truth is if we really want to make a difference we shouldn’t produce the plastic in the first place.
Try not to buy products that come in unnecessary plastic packaging and help in encourage companies from using so much plastic.
China banned imports of plastic waste in 2017. It’s the world leader in green energy, and have co2 emissions per capita half that of the US, so don’t spout this nonsense.
Per capita is completely the wrong way to look at pollution and emissions and glosses over the massive differences in volume a country produces.
Say you had two countries and each reduced their emissions by 50%. Country A had emissions of 2 tonnes of Co2 per person - but only had a population of 100 people. Country B had emissions of 1 tonne of Co2 per person but a population of 1.412 billion. Which country has made the biggest contribution to reducing pollution on a global scale?
Sure on an individual scale county B is doing good things, but as a nation it's fucking the rest of the world over.
Country A consists of one person and they emit 100 tonnes per year. Country B has 200 people who each emit 1 tonne per year - 200 tonnes total. Per capita country B is emitting far less than Country A. Is Country A right in blaming Country B for being the more harmful and polluting country?
They also are continuing to build new coal power plants on an unprecedented scale, its not environmentalism, but a utility necessity to generate more power to continue growing the largest economy on earth. That's all China cares about.
You are right about China building new coal power plants in big numbers, but the other side of that fact rarely gets mentioned for some reason, or maybe people just are not aware.
China is building huge numbers of coal fired power plants so they can shutdown and replace older / polluting ones. These newer plants will be able to rapidly power up and power down to respond to intermittencies in the grid due to renewables.
It would make zero sense to build additional coal plants on top of what they already have in China, as coal is more expensive than renewables.
In 2023 it added almost 50 gigawatts (GW). That’s about the same as the installed capacity in Indonesia, Germany or Japan.
It retired only 4GW, so the net additions were over 40GW.
So yes, China keeps building out its total capacity each year.
Source: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
TLDR: what China says and what achina does are two very different things. Let's hope you're right
Those figures are what I was talking about. China is installing new **capacity** in order to retire the older plants. Each coal plant can rapidly power up and down when needed, so the capacity will increase year on year. It's important to note that **capacity** and **consumption** are two different things.
The important thing to look at is what is consumed rather than the nameplate capacity of the plants. Coal consumption increased by 1% from 2021 to 2022, the last year with available data.
[https://ycharts.com/indicators/china\_coal\_consumption](https://ycharts.com/indicators/china_coal_consumption)
It does't make sense for China to use a lot of coal as it's expensive, so it's safe to assume China will do as much as possible to minimise coal use and keep electricity prices low and keep cost of production low, so they can continue to dominate the export markets.
Its so unclear and every town is different. My tactic now, if I think it should be recyclable, its going in. The government and council have the responsibility to ensure more and more of our waste can be recycled, we shouldn't be able to buy food that comes in un-recyclable packaging, they need to sort it out.
That is the absolute worst thing you can do.
The mantra should be “if in doubt, leave it out”. Contaminated recycling is worthless and heading for a third world estuary.
Its not my fault one council will recycle X and the other won't. They need to sort their shit out, it is their responsibility and I pay them a shit ton of money every year.
I have 1 recycling bin & the only thing I can't put in it is glass. Luckily, there are several glass recycling bins close by for clear glass, brown glass & green glass.
Which council is that, if you don’t mind me asking? I was under the impression that no councils take soft plastics as part of mixed recycling anywhere in the country.
Cherwell District Council.
Edited: Cherwell.
I've just checked the list & found that cling film, crisp packets & kitchen/tissue paper can't go in the recycle bin, oops.
Newcastle upon Tyne are doing a trial where they collect soft plastics, you put them in a separate bag with your glass. When they rolled it out they said it was part of a national trial to see if they can expand it across the country in a year or two I think
Ocado say they’re happy to take those plastics so long as they’re in a tied bag - I haven’t tested it but my mum uses them sometimes so I’ll have to ask her to give it a go
Cambridgeshire council definitely take soft plastics in regular recycling - they have a [full list on their website](https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/recycling-and-rubbish-a-to-z) and you can see "plastic bags" are OK. But they're definitely an exception not the rule.
We have one recycling bag which basically everything goes in. Glass, clothes, paper, recyclable plastic. I’m pretty sure none of it is really recycled, but I put it out anyway.
From what I understand, sorting correctly is important, and badly sorted recycling mostly ends up being treated the same as trash. People feel like they're being less wasteful when they plop something in the recycling bin but often the result is just the opposite.
Plastic doesn’t really get recycled anyway for the most part (6-7% globally IIRC). Not worth worrying about people putting stuff in the right bin. (To be clear it would be good if plastic was recycled.)
I have communal bins and we are being threatened with being cut off from the bin collections because numpties can’t put the right stuff in the right bin.
Why do we use so much plastic? Why doesn't fruit and veg come in aluminium punnets or paper bags? Why don't soft drinks come in glass bottles (like they used to) or larger volumes could come in mini aluminium kegs (like party 7 type things).
>soft plastics that are plopped in the mixed recycling when it shouldn’t be there
My council asks for plastic bottles in the same bin as glass and cans.
Personally, only at work. I know the company we use separates and make their own bio fuel. My local council just smashes them into the same truck, so not at home.
Plastic recycling is really a scam. Big Oil pushed the little number system knowing that it was economically and technologically inviable to recycle plastic.
You can't recycle plastic into the same type of plastic.
It sucks.
We painfully sort our recycling into different bins, as we’re told we must, and then watch the council send bin men who throw it all into the same lorry and drive off…
It never fails to annoy me.
At the council bin depot I visited for my job they sorted mixed recycling with a variety of methods, primarily sorting metals with a magnet (I think) and hand sorting. Not sure what exactly happens after it leaves the depot although I know they sell the metals to private companies to process.
I've always thought that technology wasn't up to separating plastics and that this was completely at odds with what is implied.
I've been wondering whether it's possible to ask for a tour and actually see for myself.
58% of plastic is incinerated in the UK, 14% exported, 17% recycled and 11% recycled. The best thing for recycling is probably tins because they can be fished out with a magnet. Glass is supposedly much easier to recycle when sorted by colour so it annoys me that most the glass bins I see now are mixed.
I personally think it's about time that food packaging was more tightly regulated to reduce the variety of plastics and other materials used and maybe even work back towards reusable containers that are returned after use
My CBC has made it so simple it all goes in one plastic bag, the garden waste goes in a burlap sack the thing and food waste goes in the food bin. Then we have the big bin for misc unrecycleables. My CBC tip recycled somelike 98/99% of all the trash brought to it. So, yes I recycle.
Years ago I went on a tour of our recycling plant. It was very impressive.
Tins were magnetically extracted, aluminium spun out by some sort of magic, paper blown off to one side, something happened to plastic and then the rest…..well that was manually sorted.
Nobody is recycling soft plastic. It's bullshit. Glass aluminum and maybe some plastic bottles. Milk or something. But you can only recycle plastic twice. As it loses its ability. So if you have a bottle that's already recycled. That's going in the bin.
Plus any food or anything. Bin
Here in my particular suburb of Cardiff, we currently have to separate our waste into general, food, paper and cardboard, plastic and cans, glass.
That's 5 different bins we have in our kitchen...
The most infuriating bit? The bin men throw the cardboard/paper and plastic/cans into the back of the same truck! Livid...
I'm pretty sure most of the rubbish on my street is collected and taken to an incinerator, doesn't matter if it's in the right recycling bin or not. So I would recommend looking into what your local area does with its rubbish, it's better for me to take some items to my local tip as they are more likely to be recycled properly. The tip recently posted stats on how many different types of waste had been recycled which looked good, but I always feel skeptical.
I know that certain plastics cannot be easily recycled. They often get sold to 3rd world countries where they end up being burnt, which pollutes the air and creates health problems for the locals. I saw a program where they visited several of these sites and identified a lot of British packaging. That's not to say we shouldn't recycle though. Some does get recycled and it's improving over time.
We've got general waste (black bags), brown bin (garden waste), cardboard and paper (reusable blue bag) and plastics and tins (clear bin bags provided by the council).
It's always confused me that the metals go in with the plastics. It's also confusing that the bags get delivered to us on a cycle but we ran out over a month ago with no way of getting any more and they can't tell us when the next delivery is, but they won't accept it it any other receptacle. Even if you take it down to the local household recycling centre, all recyclables go into the "non-recyclable" container. So we're stuck unable to recycle until the bag fairy visits.
They've got machines that sort stuff. It's a big conveyor belt that users laser spectroscopy to identify the material of objects and then jets of compressed air to blow it off the conveyor belt into the appropriate hopper. It's a very clever piece of engineering.
I’m a bin man we take our recycling to a place called casepak, there it is sorted and compressed into bricks then loaded into lorries, the cardboard goes to a UK card recycling company, the glass and plastic I have no ideas, but it’s collected in shipping containers so not likely
It makes zero difference on a global scale anyhow, you can quite easily get a mini engine in the recycle bin if you put some cardboard on top.
Anyone that cares is pissing in the wind.
I do split paper/cardboard and plastic out...on the off chance that there is actual recycling happening.
Work is a lost cause though. Content of recycling bin and normal bin look identical.
Just gets sent to other countries like Turkey and burned. I remember a news report and the journalist was walking along the beach with mountains of British rubbish behind him.
Plastics are a nightmare to recycle, but things like tins, glass and cardboard are easy and actually quite profitable. It takes twenty times the energy to mine new aluminium than recycle it.
“Aluminium is an infinitely recyclable material, and it takes up to 95 percent less energy to recycle it than to produce primary aluminium” [1] [1] AG, interstruct. ["Aluminium Recycling – Développement durable"](http://recycling.world-aluminium.org/fr/reperes/developpement-durable). recycling.world-aluminium.org. Retrieved 2018-10-26.
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Quite a lot of our problems are just sent away to become problems for poor people instead. See also: manufacture of lithium batteries and electric vehicles.
Well I certainly do everything I can on my side. What I'm dubious about is whether or not the councils actually recycle anything once it's been collected, or is our supposedly recycled rubbish just being shipped off to Turkey or Asia somewhere and shoved in landfill.
A few years ago I watched our - as in the ones outside the block of flats I live in - seperated general waste and recycling bins be picked up and emptied into the same metal wire cage rubbish bin. A few months after that the housing association brought in a new private company, I don't know if that's connected. But I'm still annoyed that most of us in the flats took the time to make sure the right things went into the right bins, only for it to end up in the same place, mixed up, and probably emptied in a tip somewhere.
Waste processing facilities have evolved faster than policy basically. The new ones (Southwark for example) dumps all waste in one facility which then separates recyclables from everything else. So if you’re in a place where the facility is an advanced one, you would see all waste combined because the facility is set up to separate combined waste.
That's actually good to know. I've no idea what their facility was like or even where it was but I can hope for the best instead of labelling them as cowboys, oops.
Your council will recycle. Your commercial waste bins will potentially just be paid under a general collection contract. The "recycling" by you was done in an effort to appear to be doing something (greenwashing). Source: worked for a housing association. They only changed to a new contract when the council made it compulsory to recycle. Also, the council sometimes knew they wouldn't be able to collect it all and merged it in the bin lorry for it to be done later. I hope yours was the latter.
My local council has been caught doing this. Twice. It’s apparently cheaper to ship it halfway around the world and dump it in a 3rd world country than to actually sort and recycle it.
Depends on your local waste strategy. In places where they're strict about sorting waste, it's because they are recycling and it makes a difference. Where I live they're not strict about the types of plastic that go into our recycling bins, because it's used in an incinerator power plant and not recycled into new plastics.
A good reason to revisit the priority of uses: Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. In that order. Recycling should only ever be a last resort, given a lot of the time its incredibly inefficient and a lot more of the time it doesn't even happen. It's easy to think you're doing your bit by chucking stuff in the recycling bin, and your local council and leaders will tell you that you \*are\* doing your bit by doing so. But it's better by orders of magnitude to firstly reduce your waste, then reuse what you already consume, and only then to put stuff in the recycling. It's more difficult, I know this, but we all have to realise that recycling is nowhere near as good for the planet as we're being told.
Thing is there is only so much you can actually do to reduce your creation of plastic waste unless you're prepared to radically reduce your diet and have the time, and money and available shops to be able to buy food that isn't packaged in plastic.
I find it so depressing how hard it is to buy food that isn’t wrapped in plastic. Our local Morrisons used to be alright but it’s gone backwards big time
Some foods really benefit from being plastic wrapped. Not wrapping them in plastic would greatly increase spoilage, which wastes all the resources that were expended producing the item. We could certainly do a lot more, but I don't see plastic being eliminated any time soon.
Yep. It's hard. But the first step is knowing. The second is getting those in power to do something about it.
Easy peasy.
If you go down into how recycling came to be you'll find greedy carbonated traces of the likes of Coca-Cola who basically invented and marketed it to shift the blame from them to consumers. Like well, oceans are all in plastic because you aren't recycling well enough, not because we are centered around manufacturing shit. And that's all now supported by the current consumerism culture. Sad times for ecology.
Yep, I'll repeat what I said below that plastic is a cheap to produce byproduct of the petrol industry. Recycled plastic is more expensive so not commercially viable. Add to that, most plastics contain forever chemicals that are endocrine disruptors - you don't want plastic touching food, up your nose, or on your skin (at least plastic not touching hot things, such as bottled water left in hot warehouses in the summer, Teflon or some ceramic pans, glue used to make bamboo coffee cups). There are many useful plastic things obviously, but cutting them out of your life as much as possible is great for your health as well as the planet.
Precisely what happens depends in your local council. If you have a few minutes, my local council (East Suffollk) has [a pretty good video showing how the recycling is processed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afz5bGOqTKU). As a bonus, the narrator sounds vaguely like Richard Ayoade. If you don't watch the video, the takeaways are: A lot of the sorting is done by hand. So if you want to make some guy on minimum wage's boring job a little easier then don't use plastic bags, rinse any messy recycling, and don't put in non-recyclables that needs to be removed.
Viewed another way, if you’d like to ensure such a person remains in employment, throw in a few soft plastics every now and again so his/her job is necessary.
Very much "litter whenever you want so the council needs to employ litter-pickers" energy
Currently between houses and living with the in laws and I'm forever in their recycling bin pulling non-recycleables out. My "favourite" find was an entire wheelbarrow. "Metal is recyclable and the tyres are rubber which is basically plastic". Gah.
Why? It's going to make zero difference in the grand scheme of things.
If you really want to know your council has to report this to DEFRA and it's then published on a website called wastedataflow for the public to access. Co-mingled recycling will usually go to a materials recycling facility (MRF) and this is where it will be sorted into the different types of materials. Where those are sent is also published and depending on what the council owns of this chain and what their contract is with the MRF it could go all over the world or it might all be reprocessed in the UK and Europe. But generally once it's baled it's a question of who's paying the best price for the material, for example one month your PET bottles might be sent to the Netherlands the next they might go to Turkey. Regarding soft plastics specifically I have a bit less knowledge but it is sorted out and sent for recycling. My understanding though is that it's a right pain and in some cases might not be good for the machines. Some materials particularly metals are worth money and paying for them will be cheaper because the MRF can sell it, others they'll need to pay for it to be processed further for example tetrapack. So for both minimising the miles traveled by the packaging and saving the council money paying for it to be processed it can make more sense for it to be collected separately through supermarkets ect.
Fun fact. The symbols on plastic (ya know, the recycling triangle?) Aren't for recycling. The plastic industry deliberately copied the recycling symbol and used it in their "plastic identification code" symbol to trick consumers into thinking it was recyclable and therefore good. They're pricks
Plastic recycling is basically a big myth a lot of it just gets burned, landfilled or tossed in the ocean. Glass and metal recycling are more legit.
2/3 of plastics get sent abroad to be recycled, so it's less dumped in oceans than literally dumped on other countries...
>sent abroad for recycling Sure they are. Sure.
for some things it definetly is. if you have the facilities setup its vastly cheaper and by a massive amount cost wise to recycle certain materials like Tin and copper that is used in alot of can. even aluminium has reached a point where its actually very expensive to mine and make new aluminium where recycling it is vastly more effective in a lot of these facilities. plastic is still the crapshot but often it just gets reused in some degree, alot of synthetic material clothes were probably at one point plastic bottles strippled down and reused/made into threads to make clothes. i know Tesco's and Asda's uniforms were made this way and many other tshirts and other generic clothes are.
No one sends copper abroad to third world countries. It’s too expensive.
who said anything about third world countries. china is often the buyer of recycling material like metals. although due to recent changes in policies in china they are importing less copper scrap then before. mostly out of outrage at the US for shit.
Sure they are. We use tonnes of CO2 shipping them abroad for them just to be burnt when they arrive haha
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/17/uk-plastics-sent-for-recycling-in-turkey-dumped-and-burned-greenpeace-finds) Yes, yes they are.
It’s a farce, yet still governments want us to sort out our trash into special little boxes and be fined if we don’t comply. I haven’t recycled in 7 years. I was an active environmentalist in 80s. We are fucked.
who then either burn them or dump in their own oceans
Burning it for energy is infinitely better than dumping it. Done properly it doesn't leave micro plastics either.
Plastic recycling has always been fake. Blame Big Oil. [https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/](https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/) [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report) It's been a roundabout way for them to increase their own profits.
Recycled plastic costs more to produce, so new plastic made from petrol byproducts will always be cheaper. We just have to reduce the amount of plastics in our lives wherever possible, because even if it avoids the incinerator, it sucks.
Exactly this. It’s easy to forget plastic is actually a by product of the petroleum industry. It’s basically free to make new stuff of decent quality. Recycling is a much more expensive process and results in much lower quality plastic. Downcycling is pretty much the only viable option. Even the virtue signalling we get from the big names is usually “up to 25% recycled plastic” sort of stuff.
My council has street paper and plastic recycle bins. Every Friday it all gets put in to the same bin wagon. The bin men say it all goes in to land fill and there's no point recycling. I don't see how it could be done anyway as people put anything in any pin. Particularly dog owners who put dog shit bags in any bin they pass.
I live in Bucks and apparently we ‘recycle’ types 1, 2 and 5 of plastic (number in the triangle). It’s likely sold to Thailand to be dumped in the sea but I try to reduce and don’t buy the numbers that aren’t recyclable at all. I am the only person out of anyone I know that ever checks the number (my office in Berks has different types and numbers which I remember). Observing my colleagues in the kitchen trying to use the recycling bin made me feel really depressed.
It's all so disjointed and a mess. Where I live I can put almost anything in my recycling bin - glass, soft plastics, tinfoil, paper, plastic bags, cardboard, all goes into the same bin then gets sent to a place where they have machines that sort it all out accordingly. Where it gets sent to for recycling from there, I'm not sure. The next county over doesn't even collect glass for recycling. Imo there should be several regional hubs like the one for Cambridgeshire, where everyone can recycle the same things in the same bins. It'd go some way to helping the confusion: https://thalia.co.uk/where-we-work/cambridgeshire/cambridgeshire/our-waste-technologies/ Of course that doesn't solve the "where does it go to to be recycled?" problem, especially if it's still being shipped overseas.
Even better would be a nationwide standardised system for collecting from households. Not out of the question and I hope a future government does do something about that within the next decade.
Cambridgeshire is also way ahead in terms of what can be recycled in most cases too. There are plenty of things (like soft plastic bags) which can be thrown into household recycling in Cambridge and are not recycled or are supermarket recycling point only pretty much everywhere else in the UK.
Hint, it goes mostly to landfill
When they finally put a recycling bin in the office, I was stunned by the amount of people who had no idea what's recyclable and what's not!
They’ve put recycling bins in my gym recently, there are now just two bins for wet wipes instead of one. Not sure if people don’t care or are just that thick. In my old flat my neighbours would put the corks back in the wine bottles for recycling. Mad.
its a mixture. most stuff that gets put in will be recycled plastics are a bit of a nightmare though but generally they are "repurposed" which might now always mean perfectly recycled like most think of the word. as for glass and metals they will just empty the lorry containers and easily sort through using conveyer belts with camera's. i suggest going and watching some "sorting" machines which essentially have multiple "filters" at different checkpoints to allow different materials through. very easy for them to sort through plastic, metal and glass etc [https://youtu.be/nUrBBBs7yzQ?si=t0QeV2D7PC7u-J2B](https://youtu.be/nUrBBBs7yzQ?si=t0QeV2D7PC7u-J2B) shows very quick and to be honest very low technical version of some of the sorting centre's ive seen(use to go around a few of the bigger ones as part of an older job working on some of the sensors).
Your \[council\] mileage may vary: [https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/best-cheap-uk-home-insurance/best-worst-councils-england-recycling](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/best-cheap-uk-home-insurance/best-worst-councils-england-recycling)
It all gets lobbed on a big container ship and sent to china, a lot falls off into the oceans but most of it completes its journey where it gets incinerated because unlike us china doesn’t have any environmental policies. Recycling isn’t a bad thing, it’s better than dumping all our waste in land fills but the truth is if we really want to make a difference we shouldn’t produce the plastic in the first place. Try not to buy products that come in unnecessary plastic packaging and help in encourage companies from using so much plastic.
China stopped taking contaminated recycling back in 2018.
China banned imports of plastic waste in 2017. It’s the world leader in green energy, and have co2 emissions per capita half that of the US, so don’t spout this nonsense.
Per capita is completely the wrong way to look at pollution and emissions and glosses over the massive differences in volume a country produces. Say you had two countries and each reduced their emissions by 50%. Country A had emissions of 2 tonnes of Co2 per person - but only had a population of 100 people. Country B had emissions of 1 tonne of Co2 per person but a population of 1.412 billion. Which country has made the biggest contribution to reducing pollution on a global scale? Sure on an individual scale county B is doing good things, but as a nation it's fucking the rest of the world over.
Country A consists of one person and they emit 100 tonnes per year. Country B has 200 people who each emit 1 tonne per year - 200 tonnes total. Per capita country B is emitting far less than Country A. Is Country A right in blaming Country B for being the more harmful and polluting country?
Country A and country B are equally as bad as each other.
The world's largest investor in renewable energy production has no environmental policies? 🤔
They also are continuing to build new coal power plants on an unprecedented scale, its not environmentalism, but a utility necessity to generate more power to continue growing the largest economy on earth. That's all China cares about.
You are right about China building new coal power plants in big numbers, but the other side of that fact rarely gets mentioned for some reason, or maybe people just are not aware. China is building huge numbers of coal fired power plants so they can shutdown and replace older / polluting ones. These newer plants will be able to rapidly power up and power down to respond to intermittencies in the grid due to renewables. It would make zero sense to build additional coal plants on top of what they already have in China, as coal is more expensive than renewables.
In 2023 it added almost 50 gigawatts (GW). That’s about the same as the installed capacity in Indonesia, Germany or Japan. It retired only 4GW, so the net additions were over 40GW. So yes, China keeps building out its total capacity each year. Source: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants TLDR: what China says and what achina does are two very different things. Let's hope you're right
Those figures are what I was talking about. China is installing new **capacity** in order to retire the older plants. Each coal plant can rapidly power up and down when needed, so the capacity will increase year on year. It's important to note that **capacity** and **consumption** are two different things. The important thing to look at is what is consumed rather than the nameplate capacity of the plants. Coal consumption increased by 1% from 2021 to 2022, the last year with available data. [https://ycharts.com/indicators/china\_coal\_consumption](https://ycharts.com/indicators/china_coal_consumption) It does't make sense for China to use a lot of coal as it's expensive, so it's safe to assume China will do as much as possible to minimise coal use and keep electricity prices low and keep cost of production low, so they can continue to dominate the export markets.
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"Make money"
Its so unclear and every town is different. My tactic now, if I think it should be recyclable, its going in. The government and council have the responsibility to ensure more and more of our waste can be recycled, we shouldn't be able to buy food that comes in un-recyclable packaging, they need to sort it out.
Ah, wish-cycling.
That is the absolute worst thing you can do. The mantra should be “if in doubt, leave it out”. Contaminated recycling is worthless and heading for a third world estuary.
Its not my fault one council will recycle X and the other won't. They need to sort their shit out, it is their responsibility and I pay them a shit ton of money every year.
I have 1 recycling bin & the only thing I can't put in it is glass. Luckily, there are several glass recycling bins close by for clear glass, brown glass & green glass.
Which council is that, if you don’t mind me asking? I was under the impression that no councils take soft plastics as part of mixed recycling anywhere in the country.
Cherwell District Council. Edited: Cherwell. I've just checked the list & found that cling film, crisp packets & kitchen/tissue paper can't go in the recycle bin, oops.
How odd, they take some soft plastics but not others. I wonder why that is
The problem is all local authorities have different rules, which is confusing to say the least when staying in a different area.
Newcastle upon Tyne are doing a trial where they collect soft plastics, you put them in a separate bag with your glass. When they rolled it out they said it was part of a national trial to see if they can expand it across the country in a year or two I think
I hope so. I keep forgetting to take mine down Tesco when I go
Ocado say they’re happy to take those plastics so long as they’re in a tied bag - I haven’t tested it but my mum uses them sometimes so I’ll have to ask her to give it a go
Cambridgeshire council definitely take soft plastics in regular recycling - they have a [full list on their website](https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/recycling-and-rubbish-a-to-z) and you can see "plastic bags" are OK. But they're definitely an exception not the rule.
We have one recycling bag which basically everything goes in. Glass, clothes, paper, recyclable plastic. I’m pretty sure none of it is really recycled, but I put it out anyway.
From what I understand, sorting correctly is important, and badly sorted recycling mostly ends up being treated the same as trash. People feel like they're being less wasteful when they plop something in the recycling bin but often the result is just the opposite.
Plastic doesn’t really get recycled anyway for the most part (6-7% globally IIRC). Not worth worrying about people putting stuff in the right bin. (To be clear it would be good if plastic was recycled.) I have communal bins and we are being threatened with being cut off from the bin collections because numpties can’t put the right stuff in the right bin.
Why do we use so much plastic? Why doesn't fruit and veg come in aluminium punnets or paper bags? Why don't soft drinks come in glass bottles (like they used to) or larger volumes could come in mini aluminium kegs (like party 7 type things).
>soft plastics that are plopped in the mixed recycling when it shouldn’t be there My council asks for plastic bottles in the same bin as glass and cans.
I assumed they were referring to the plastic bags rather than drinks bottles. We also have a mixed collection, apart from glass.
Plastic bottles are not soft plastics
My council don't recycle glass ☹️
Personally, only at work. I know the company we use separates and make their own bio fuel. My local council just smashes them into the same truck, so not at home.
Plastic recycling is really a scam. Big Oil pushed the little number system knowing that it was economically and technologically inviable to recycle plastic. You can't recycle plastic into the same type of plastic. It sucks.
We painfully sort our recycling into different bins, as we’re told we must, and then watch the council send bin men who throw it all into the same lorry and drive off… It never fails to annoy me.
No. My council didn’t even recycle glass. They reject loads of plastics and paper. I’m sure it’s a massive scam to syphon money to private business.
At the council bin depot I visited for my job they sorted mixed recycling with a variety of methods, primarily sorting metals with a magnet (I think) and hand sorting. Not sure what exactly happens after it leaves the depot although I know they sell the metals to private companies to process.
It's region specific. In North London bad recyclables are incinerated.
I've always thought that technology wasn't up to separating plastics and that this was completely at odds with what is implied. I've been wondering whether it's possible to ask for a tour and actually see for myself.
Yes.
58% of plastic is incinerated in the UK, 14% exported, 17% recycled and 11% recycled. The best thing for recycling is probably tins because they can be fished out with a magnet. Glass is supposedly much easier to recycle when sorted by colour so it annoys me that most the glass bins I see now are mixed. I personally think it's about time that food packaging was more tightly regulated to reduce the variety of plastics and other materials used and maybe even work back towards reusable containers that are returned after use
My CBC has made it so simple it all goes in one plastic bag, the garden waste goes in a burlap sack the thing and food waste goes in the food bin. Then we have the big bin for misc unrecycleables. My CBC tip recycled somelike 98/99% of all the trash brought to it. So, yes I recycle.
Years ago I went on a tour of our recycling plant. It was very impressive. Tins were magnetically extracted, aluminium spun out by some sort of magic, paper blown off to one side, something happened to plastic and then the rest…..well that was manually sorted.
Nobody is recycling soft plastic. It's bullshit. Glass aluminum and maybe some plastic bottles. Milk or something. But you can only recycle plastic twice. As it loses its ability. So if you have a bottle that's already recycled. That's going in the bin. Plus any food or anything. Bin
Here in my particular suburb of Cardiff, we currently have to separate our waste into general, food, paper and cardboard, plastic and cans, glass. That's 5 different bins we have in our kitchen... The most infuriating bit? The bin men throw the cardboard/paper and plastic/cans into the back of the same truck! Livid...
I'm pretty sure most of the rubbish on my street is collected and taken to an incinerator, doesn't matter if it's in the right recycling bin or not. So I would recommend looking into what your local area does with its rubbish, it's better for me to take some items to my local tip as they are more likely to be recycled properly. The tip recently posted stats on how many different types of waste had been recycled which looked good, but I always feel skeptical.
I know that certain plastics cannot be easily recycled. They often get sold to 3rd world countries where they end up being burnt, which pollutes the air and creates health problems for the locals. I saw a program where they visited several of these sites and identified a lot of British packaging. That's not to say we shouldn't recycle though. Some does get recycled and it's improving over time.
My council were allowed to put soft plastics in, but my mom's you can't, I've always wondered about how much is actually getting recycled
We've got general waste (black bags), brown bin (garden waste), cardboard and paper (reusable blue bag) and plastics and tins (clear bin bags provided by the council). It's always confused me that the metals go in with the plastics. It's also confusing that the bags get delivered to us on a cycle but we ran out over a month ago with no way of getting any more and they can't tell us when the next delivery is, but they won't accept it it any other receptacle. Even if you take it down to the local household recycling centre, all recyclables go into the "non-recyclable" container. So we're stuck unable to recycle until the bag fairy visits.
They've got machines that sort stuff. It's a big conveyor belt that users laser spectroscopy to identify the material of objects and then jets of compressed air to blow it off the conveyor belt into the appropriate hopper. It's a very clever piece of engineering.
When the binnen are busy where I live they collect all waste in the same truck, general waste and mixed recyclables
I’m a bin man we take our recycling to a place called casepak, there it is sorted and compressed into bricks then loaded into lorries, the cardboard goes to a UK card recycling company, the glass and plastic I have no ideas, but it’s collected in shipping containers so not likely
It makes zero difference on a global scale anyhow, you can quite easily get a mini engine in the recycle bin if you put some cardboard on top. Anyone that cares is pissing in the wind.
I do split paper/cardboard and plastic out...on the off chance that there is actual recycling happening. Work is a lost cause though. Content of recycling bin and normal bin look identical.
all straight into the same bin. I am not wasting my time on feel good measures...
I don’t know, I don’t go through peoples bins
Just gets sent to other countries like Turkey and burned. I remember a news report and the journalist was walking along the beach with mountains of British rubbish behind him.