With consumers and the government outraged at the plastics crisis, the waste industry is scrambling to solve the problem. One great hope is chemical recycling: turning problem plastics into oil or gas through industrial processes.
The idea found its way to Griffiths, a former management consultant, by accident, after a mistake in a Warwick University press release. Intrigued, Griffiths got in touch. He ended up partnering with the researchers to launch a company that could do this. While the global mood has turned against plastic, Griffiths is a rare defender of it.
If you use more glass, more metal, those materials have a much higher carbon footprint. Eventually, Griffiths hopes to sell the machines to recycling facilities worldwide. There is cause for optimism: in December , the UK government published a comprehensive new waste strategy , partly in response to National Sword.
They hope to force the industry to invest in recycling infrastructure at home. Meanwhile, the industry is being forced to adapt: in May, countries passed measures to track and control the export of plastic waste to developing countries, while more than companies have signed a global commitment to eliminate the use of single-use plastics by Recycling rates in the west are stalling and packaging use is set to soar in developing countries, where recycling rates are low.
P erhaps there is an alternative. Since Blue Planet II brought the plastic crisis to our attention, a dying trade is having a resurgence in Britain: the milkman. More of us are choosing to have milk bottles delivered, collected and re-used. Similar models are springing up: zero-waste shops that require you to bring your own containers ; the boom in refillable cups and bottles.
Tom Szaky wants to apply the milkman model to almost everything you buy. The bearded, shaggy-haired Hungarian-Canadian is a veteran of the waste industry: he founded his first recycling startup as a student at Princeton, selling worm-based fertiliser out of re-used bottles. That company, TerraCycle, is now a recycling giant, with operations in 21 countries. The product launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos and was an immediate hit. The result is Loop , which launched trials in France and the US this spring and will arrive in Britain this winter.
The items are available online or through exclusive retailers. Customers pay a small deposit, and the used containers are eventually collected by a courier or dropped off in store Walgreens in the US, Tesco in the UK , washed, and sent back to the producer to be refilled.
Many of the Loop designs are familiar: refillable glass bottles of Coca-Cola and Tropicana; aluminium bottles of Pantene. But others are being rethought entirely. Even the deliveries come in a specially designed insulated bag, to cut down on cardboard. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans.
Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. Above all, experts say it should be a wake-up call to the world on the need to sharply cut down on single-use plastics.
However, the places trying to take up some of the slack in tended to be lower-income countries, primarily in Southeast Asia, many of which lack the infrastructure to properly handle recyclables. Many of those countries were quickly overwhelmed by the volume and have also now cut back on imports. There, they were turned into forms to be repurposed by plastic manufacturers.
Before the ban, Duong says, his company sold around 70 percent of its recyclables to China. Now that has fallen to near zero. As a result, contamination from food and waste has risen, leaving significant amounts unusable.
In addition, plastic packaging has become increasingly complex, with colors, additives, and multilayer, mixed compositions making it ever more difficult to recycle. China has now cut off imports of all but the cleanest and highest-grade materials — imposing a Costs associated with recycling are up, revenue associated with recycling is down.
But not all plastic can be recycled, and only about 6. And since each type can only be recycled with its own kind, plastics need to be carefully sorted before they can be processed. The presence of enough foreign materials—from food to dissimilar kinds of plastic—can ruin an entire batch of would-be recyclables. Plastics are chemically categorized by numbers, which are displayed inside the chasing-arrow icon on many plastic containers.
The two most common types are plastic 1 polyethylene terephthalate, or PETE , which is used mainly in soda and water bottles, and 2 high-density polyethylene, or HDPE , used in things like detergent bottles and milk jugs.
Unfortunately, while plastics marked 1 or 2 are generally considered to be recyclable, not all containers with those numbers actually are. The reason for this is that many plastics contain additives blended into the original resin, and the different additives create discrepancies even within each category.
Every container in the grocery store is made with a unique blend of chemicals—plasticizers, molding agents, dyes—that combine to give a plastic its shape, color, strength, and flexibility or lack thereof. As a result, they melt at varying temperatures and respond differently to new additives, and so they cannot all be melted down and recycled together to make a new product.
As a result, most plastic, aside from the ubiquitous clear plastic bottle, cannot, generally speaking, be recycled by most municipalities. And among recycling enthusiasts, one group is particularly keen—people already concerned about climate change.
This makes a certain intuitive sense, as recycling has well-documented benefits for the planet and can reduce carbon emissions. Still, as climate actions go, even the most committed recyclers caution that this one has clear limits. Recycling does have value. It is one of the easier climate-friendly acts individuals can undertake, and it reduces the extraction of virgin materials.
Read: Is this the end of recycling? Despite the carbon involved in collection, transport, and processing, recycled aluminum, for example, is about 95 percent less energy-intensive to forge than its raw alternative. Project Drawdown, a nonprofit group that conducts reviews of climate solutions, includes recycling in its recommendations for reining in emissions. But when the group analyzed more than 80 separate means that could help keep the world from passing the oft-cited threshold of 1.
It gives more weight to solutions such as onshore wind turbines for that reason. If 1 million metric tons of waste are landfilled, direct emissions equal about , tons of CO 2 -equivalent, Miranda Gorman, a senior fellow with the group, explained to me. Not sending items for disposal avoids creating those emissions.
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