What happens to our recycling once it leaves for the Depot? With Kids Against Plastic Amy Meek
11/28/2021
In the UK, once the plastic has been collected from your bin, it's often taken to what's called a materials recovery facility, which is basically where all of this material is sorted and separated by machines and sometimes by hand into the different types of material. This material is then sent to manufacturers and sometimes internationally to be used for new products. This is where we'd expect them to end up, however what actually happens to it starts to diverge, because in theory, you'd expect these sorted plastic bottles for example to be made into brand-new bottles. But often, they're actually downcycled, which is what I mentioned previously, into materials that were less worth than before. So it's like making lots of old plastic bottles into something like a kitchen bucket, for example. And because these bottles say are not made into the brand-new bottles, it means that lots more of them need to be produced and thrown away each day. Also, there's a lot of red herrings in this recycling process because it was found earlier this year that more than half of the plastic that the government says is recycled is actually shipped abroad to different countries who are often unable to deal with the amount of waste that's being sent to them. So whilst recycling often sounds great in theory, it has a lot of difficulties to it that need to be overcome before we start to rely on it.
Greenwashing and plastic recycling?
Recycling has so many red herrings around it and so much greenwashing, which I think is why it's become such a big problem, because how often do you hear a company that manufactures plastic items, for example, talk about the recyclability of their product? It's something that we see so often on labels, so often in advertising, when actually, if you look under the surface at the amount of recycled plastic content that's actually included in these products, it's often zero per cent if just slightly more than that. So there's a lot of greenwashing around recycling, because it's not actually what it's made out to be by the corporations that produce this plastic, and that's really misleading for consumers. It makes us think that using this plastic and recycling it is a really sustainable way to use plastic, when actually, the real solution to it comes from reducing plastic.
