The truth about soft plastic recycling points at supermarkets
everydayplastic.org
everydayplastic.org
That doesn't seem too bad. That means 30% got recycled, which is more than I expected given the general cynicism around plastic recycling. 30% definitely seems worthwhile.
For the plastic that got incinerated, it is presumably more efficient to burn products for energy reclamation that are already separated by type.
Having these recycling pathways set up is a necessary step towards improving recycling rates. We should be able to improve on that 30% over time.
What’s wrong with recycling the plastic into energy?
The difference is what determines whether burying or burning the plastic is better from a C02 emission standpoint.
Also, if we don't have enough plastic to completely offset the need for natural gas energy production, then the biggest cost of natural gas- the drilling and transporting- isn't a part of the equation.
For a CO2 emission stand point, there is still a lot of trucking of waste if it is getting land filled, plus land filling needs to burn a lot of diesel for creating and operating landfills. Burning plastic also likely more energy positive than going through the washing cycle to get food residue off containers to get them clean enough to use. You can just burn the food residue.
Being “burned” is how most English speakers would describe being “recycled into energy”
Of course glass, aluminum, and paper aren’t made of lightly-modified oil: they’re not all that useful as far as producing energy, nor can they substitute for new extraction of an energy resource.
I guess you could process paper into pulp pellets for fuel, and by instead turning paper into slightly-crappier paper you cut out a highly intensive transformation from timber to paper. But for plastics, isn’t the transformation from oil to plastic relatively minor?
Why is it especially virtuous for the end recycled product to be a structural product as opposed to a fuel product? Especially when it’s substituting for existing petroleum-based production, and unlikely ever to drive demand of its own? And why would burying it in the ground compare favorably to either?
At the margin, some of it must be competing with renewables. Additional supply of fossil fuels - cheap, or even negatively priced - must drive down the price of energy and make investment in renewables less attractive.
Incinerating plastics is only good if landfill is bad. Landfill really seems like it could be made cheap and safe: a landfill of a single cubic mile would last the US for 20 years.
Anything that vents ancient buried carbon into the atmosphere is wrong.
I have a strong prior that they can achieve such high numbers only because they only capture a small amount of the total amount of soft plastic waste. If they had to deal with it all there wouldn't be enough demand to burn or recycle and it would end up buried. This is somewhat supported by the fact that by official definitions supermarket take back schemes are not counted in official recyclability numbers:
> Soft plastic collected via supermarket collection points does not satisfy this definition [of working at scale] and therefore was not counted towards WRAP’s UK Plastics Pact recyclability target.
All of which to say is "downcycled" is still better than nothing. Although, in a sense the real nothing - not having a wasted bag in the first place - would be the real solution.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t reduce our soft plastic use, but - like all recycling - you need to do a bit of research and think about it, instead of adopting a “recycling is good”/“recycling is a myth” mentality.
> In New Zealand, soft plastics are mostly recycled into fence posts
The latest (2025-01) official report[^1] I could found states that the recycling of plastics in NZ is poorly known. On page 135, it mentions the report "OPMCSA plastics research (2019)" as the reference in the domain.
According to that 2019 study[^2], the plastics used each year weight more than 700k t. Much more, because this ignores packaged imports, construction and agriculture. 31% of plastics imported are LDPE (so around 170k t), which is mainly used for producing soft plastics.
Out of those 600+k t/year, 380k t go to landfill waste, and 45k t are collected for recycling. Assuming generously that 50% of those intended for recycling are actually recycled, I'd estimate that 1.7 to 3% of the yearly NZ plastics are recycled.
Here's a quote about soft plastics:
In 2017, 365 tonnes of soft plastics were recycled – but a lack of recycling market for these plastics meant that in the following year, plastic was stockpiled whilst new onshore markets were developed and a percentage of non-conforming plastic was landfilled.
[^1]: https://environment.govt.nz/assets/publications/New-Zealand-...
[^2]: https://www.pmcsa.ac.nz/topics/rethinking-plastics/quantifyi...
I'm not disagreeing with any of what you have posted.
For reference, the 52 posts that I have on my property are constructed from more milk bottles and soft plastic than I will ever consume in my lifetime. It's a drop in the bucket, but it's significant to me.
So it takes 50+ years for UV, rain and wind to turn it into microplastic mush? Sounds like a great product!
https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/microplastics-ever...
"the rate of degradation is very, very slow – untreated plastics of the type used in Future Posts degrade in the environment by 1.3um to 22um (0.0013mm/year to 0.022 mm/year for HDPE and LDPE respectively). For the mix of plastics typically in a Future Post, that means the post will degrade at a rate of around 10% of thickness of a hair every year"
Instead of being in a landfill and leaching microplastics it's all bundled up and contained. I don't really understand this defeatist attitude where if something is not perfect we should drop it all together. From my point of view any effort at sorting trash is beneficial to the ecosystem because even if we don't have a method to deal with the problem now, we can wait a generation or two for technology to improve.
The bad thing, in this line of thought, is that we’re being lied to and taken for fools. Tricked into buying things we’re promised are recyclable when they’re not.
specifically "The Recyclable Scam" section
"The promised advanced recycling for plastic but delivered toxic waste"
These plastics will have to be dealt with eventually, recycling, burning or burying them. Waiting is just a waste of money. If we wait "a generation of two", we will be drowning in warehouses full of plastics like over-ground, inadequate and expensive landfills.
These are plastics, not nuclear waste. The "wait and see" strategy works for nuclear waste works because such waste is compact, hazardous and potentially very valuable. It also decays naturally, so the simple act of waiting makes it less hazardous. Plastic waste is the opposite of that: bulky, relatively harmless, mostly worthless, and it becomes worse as it degrades.
No it shouldn't be dropped. But it certainly should be fixed. It's a bit disrespectful to the consumer to make them drag their plastic back to the store only for them to end up in the same place as their trash bin. That's the kind of thing that creates environmental apathy. Which makes it harder to drive change. People don't like being lied to.
I want plastic to be in landfill leaching microplastics.
The idea of storing all waste plastic in warehouses is impractical, it has to go somewhere.
Where do you want it leached to, if not into the contained area of a landfill? Do you want it somewhere in the environment?
And I’m pretty sure landfills are toxic anyway.
However since then many small cycle plastic to oil (Pyrolysis) plants have popped up, which are set to scale up. This reclaimed oil will be used to create new plastic.
Australia is targeting 50% recycled content in its packaging by this year.
The solution is to move away as much as possible from disposable, and most forms of consumer and retail plastic. It has invaluable uses, but there is simply too much and it's polluting faster than we can clean it.
Landfill is not a demon.
Landfill contains the toxicity.
The obsession with recycling plastic leads to unintended consequences.
For example some countries put waste plastic in roads, where cars and trucks grind it out into microplastic that go into air water food animals dust adults and children. Parts of India require this by law.
The entire concept of recycling plastic is ridiculously false and is perpetuated by the plastic packaging companies so you won’t question the infinite firehose of plastic packaging they are blasting into every part of the earth.
What exactly is all this plastic being recycled into? I certainly hope not food containers. The real answer is “not much”, because there’s zero match between the output of the plastics packaging industry and the “recycling”. Go ahead try to make a list of what could possibly be made from the gagillion tons of new plastic packaging. It’s fiction.
Why are we so desperate to “keep things out of landfill”?
Landfill is where plastic should go.
I personally throw all my plastic waste not in the recycle bin, but in the waste bin, to ensure it goes to landfill, and because I don’t want to be part of the lie that is plastic recycling.
Instead of digging up lignite to burn, and putting plastic in the ground as landfill, just burn the plastic and leave the lignite in the ground. Easy peasy.
If you could burn something at a level you don't need exhaust filters, and that even doesn't clean up all the harmful particles, we'd be building coal plants everywhere, rendering PV and renewables (and even nuclear) research unnecessary.
Likewise, power plants won't spend inordinate amounts of effort to get every last drop burned.
If only humans operated as you suggest.
In fact it's often due to insufficient temperature, that can be caused by excessive airflow.
But that's right that a power plants (in a country with good enough environmental regulation) shouldn't have this kind of problem.
But that isn't going to happen.
Edit: Well, not voluntarily.
Having said that I don’t see what’s wrong with incineration if it’s done correctly. It’s not open pit burning, with waste gases going into the environment. It’s high temperature, with additional gas and oxygen to promote more complete burning. And waste gases are filtered.
Provided they don’t get too much sun, because those dense plastic planks get much hotter than wood (I’ve measured 65C on mine). A deck is not much good if you can’t stand on it.
Also they’re expensive and don’t look very good.
Reminds me of my childhood when a milkman delivered milk to your home in bottles and you washed and left the old bottles for him to pick up. (Plus, as a kid, you would tease your friends that the milkman was your real father).
https://www.strausfamilycreamery.com/sustainable-manufacturi...
> In fact, 34 percent of the growth in bottled water sales during the past 11 years (from 2012 to 2023) has come from people switching from soft drinks and fruit drinks to bottled water. U.S. consumers now drink an average of 46.4 gallons (176 liters) of bottled water per person, compared to 34.4 gallons (129 liters) of carbonated soft drinks. -- https://wcponline.com/2024/10/01/2024-state-of-the-bottled-w...
PS: To be fair, I switched from the (acidic!) soft drinks to tap water. Almost always boiled water. Despite being comparatively confident in the quality of our tap water, the pipes mustn't be great. According to our city's water supplier, the tests come out classifying the water at their end as "soft" (bordering very soft). Yet on our end, there's a lot of chalk build up in the water kettle. I am entertaining the idea to send a sample of the tap water to a lab.
I researched about this, and the best solution is to get a water softener. These are devices that mix salts with the water that break down the limescale minerals.
That said, most reputable manufacturers and installers of these devices will recommend you have an unsoftened tap for drinking water. The minerals in the water are actually good for you, and removing them could have deleterious effects on your health. Watering plants is generally best done with unsoftened water as well.
if you’re making hot drinks, sure, but by boiling, you’re going to concentrate the minerals (and anything else in there that doesn’t like to evaporate, like PFAS)
Bottled water has it too.
If they build up to the point it’s bothering you, a little vinegar will dissolve them right out.
That's practically unavoidable, rapid changes in temperature cause the limescale to crash out of solution.
Get a water filtration device.
As another user pointed out, even those still probably have plastic in the lid. That's not great, but at least the lid is a very small contact area, whereas a lining of the entire interior of a metal can is about as large as it gets.
Question: would it be better if I just put it all in the non-recyclables bin?
So until we can guarantee that recycled plastics don’t end up in contact with food, or the plastic that does doesn’t contain nasty chemicals, it’s probably safer to bury the stuff.
Some of the work is still true, but the final conclusion about black plastic is not.
I've searched around for other corrections or challenges but haven't found any. Got a link?
Obviously no one want flame retardant, but staying away from specifically black plastic doesn't do anything.
I can't find a link right now, but for what I remember other authors agreed with the data after correction, but disagreed with the conclusion.
(Or burn 'em, I guess, but when you have potentially a whole host of mystery toxic chemicals hiding in them, is your typical scrubber going to catch all of 'em? I don't know the answer, but I'd be surprised if specialization wasn't required. Probably safer to bury.)
Most chemicals are like that, they are either non-reactive and safe, or reactive and dangerous but easily filtered. (The in between stuff is a bit harder.) Interestingly it's true for nuclear reactions: The highly radioactive stuff decays very fast and is not a problem, the really long lived stuff is barely radioactive. The worrisome stuff has medium length lives.
The technology required can be left to the industry once it becomes impossible for them to hand off the responsibility to foreign and unregulated third parties.
So is this happening?
In my country, we collect plastics at home (PMD) and it gets picked up bi-weekly in a bag. The PMD system has similar recycling stats as in the article. It is seen as an excuse for shops to declare the plastic waste problem as 'solved' without doing anything, and making consumers responsible.
The shops are fighting tooth and nail against collecting plastics themselves or introducing reusable drink bottles.
What's the UK alternative for collecting at the shop? Collecting at home? Doing nothing?
This (and combustion) would be easier if the plastics were not chlorinated, I think. So maybe focus on elimination of PVC and the like from the waste stream?
We know that now 'they' lied to us and most plastic is NOT recyclable, and they did so only to continue the oil business.
Seeing the map (Finland, Turkey, France), and in the past having garbage shipped all over the planet, do people calculate the "carbon tax" to move X tonnes to another country? The total cost of extract the energy from (the) earth (petrol for ships, fuel for planes, etc.)? Would it be better to use modern filters (as others wrote in comments) and burn them at the place of production?
I wouldn’t want to take a bag that someone else had used and was poorly cleaned, especially given how little trouble it is to just manage and reuse my own (including cleaning them ourself if we spill meat juice or something on them).
A Blue Rhino propane tank just has to hold propane; there’s no need for it to be particularly clean; as a result, I don’t care what tank I get in exchange.
The system worked great, I never understood why they dropped it.
In short, plastic recycling is a fraud perpetuated by greenwashing initiatives. The only proper thing to do with old plastic is to incinerate it at high temperatures that achieve complete combustion. This is rare though; most plastic is burned at low enough temperatures that it causes pollution.
Great stuff, plastic, huh?
The old plastic straws hardly shed while drinking. The new ones the paper gets soggy and it disintegrates and leaves the pfas coating mixed into your drink. Nice... :X
Also with alcoholic drinks eg rum colas it's easier to drink more slowly with them.
As I said, "almost no one needs" but your example isn't what I meant. Let's say someone with a disability that can'd use a cup.
I live in a county that's enacted one, and it's been unambiguously an improvement for the area on top of the core goal of "reduce plastic waste". But visiters look at me like I live in East Germany when I mention that.
I don't say this to discredit the idea, but it's politically treacherous, and not a lot of people are willing to stick their necks out for the right thing.
The level of inconvenience added to my life by not using plastic bags is so unbelievably small it's not even worth the oxygen I would need to spend to express my discomfort. It's really, really not a big deal.
The fact that some people are extraordinarily high-stress and enjoy making problems out of nothing should not be our concern. Let's not optimize for those people, they'll never be happy anyway.
The problem is, sometimes you do need them because you had to change plans and didn't bring any bags. I don't own a car or anything where I can leave them. Often leave the house without even a backpack.
And paper bags don't work when it rains or when you need to bring heavy stuff like drinks.
And my water, I buy it in 6-packs of 2L, they come plastic-wrapped with a handle so you can carry them more easily. The tapwater in my city is not drinkable.