The planet’s future is in all our hands

Jun 25 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch looks at how we can minimise the damage caused by household waste

WHILE reduced rubbish collections become the norm, the mountain of plastic from packaging doesn’t seem to be shrinking at the same rate.

Our picture, top centre, shows the typical amount of non-recyclable plastic packaging for two people over the space of a week living in Sefton.

Like in any household, the kitchen bin has been overflowing with trays and plastic wrappers from meat, fruit, biscuits and vegetables and ready meals, and margarine and dessert pots.

“My bin is full every week, and if anything I buy food with less packaging on it if I can,” says Pauline Balmer, 59, from Formby. “I hate throwing so much away, but I don’t know what else to do with it.”

When you multiply her situation by the number of UK households, the statistics become disturbing.

Across the UK we chuck out nearly 3m tonnes of waste plastic per year.

More than half of that is used packaging, and three-quarters of it is from households. It is estimated that only 7% of total plastic waste is currently being recycled.

But it’s not merely a question of goodwill and individual effort. Across the region, the picture of what plastic the council will collect from our homes varies dramatically.

No plastics at all are collected from households for recycling in Sefton. Green-minded residents in Neston, however, see margarine pots, microwave trays and all manner of lightweight plastic packaging taken away.

Recycling across Knowsley, Liverpool and Wirral is co-ordinated by the Merseyside Waste Disposal Authority, and the first stop for the rubbish they handle is the enormous material recycling facility (MRF) at Bidston.

Since 2006, vast amounts of recyclables are separated into their constituents using magnets, gravity, density tests and manual labour. It is highly efficient at collecting the materials it does recycle, but the only plastic it takes is bottle-shaped. They are removed from the waste stream, baled up and sent on to reprocessors to be sorted again and turned into something new.

But why just bottles?

“They decided on bottles when the specification for the plant was made, because they were easy to handle in terms of technology, and there was a market for them,” explains Alex Murray, assistant director of operations at MWDA. “For other plastics, there’s virtually no-one to sell them on to. We can’t collect everything, but what we do is clean and useable. It’s a big myth that everything is recyclable.”

Household recycling in earnest began after 2002, when the EU Land Directive set stringent targets to reduce rubbish going to landfill, implemented by local councils via weight-based recycling targets and starting at 25 per cent of all rubbish by 2005.

Inevitably, councils first favoured the heavier items. After glass, tin and paper started to be collected, plastic bottles were “the lowest hanging fruit” according to Recoup, the UK’s not-for-profit household plastics recycling organisation.

Made mainly of tough polyethylene terephthalate (PET or number 1 in the group of seven plastic categories which is listed on the product underside), or the chemical resistant, waxy, high density polyethylene (HDPE or 2), plastic bottles proved relatively easy to sort. Businesses started investigating ways to find uses for the end material. One in three bottles are now recycled and used to make things like fleeces and even new pop bottles, creating the sought after “closed-loop” in production.

Another attractive feature of bottle recycling is that councils can pick up £130 per tonne to offset collection costs. But extending plastic collections has its challenges.

“The thing is the weight of plastics,” admits a spokesperson for Sefton MBC. “You need so much of it to make a tonne, because plastic is so much lighter. You have to put so much in a wagon, it doesn’t weigh up.”

Centriforce, based on Liverpool’s Derby Road, can’t get enough plastic bottles, and turns industry packaging into plastic hoardings, weatherproof plastic boardwalks, kitchen counters and tables.

Recycling other common household plastics, like the polypropylene (PP or number 5) used for yoghurt pots and microwave trays, is, says commercial manager Barry Neeling, currently a “chicken and egg” situation.