Plastic is a big part of western consumers overall waste. Figures from 2002 in the UK show plastic materials were 7% of the total of household waste, and if you exclude garden waste from the total the figure was more like 10%. It will certainly have risen as a proportion since 2002. Current estimates are that the UK generates more than 3 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. Hardly any of it is recycled.
Why not
Now that s a very good short question that needs a rather long answer.
First, there is the variety problem. There are around 50 chemically distinct polymers used in household products and packaging, and it takes an expert to tell some of them apart. Secondly there s the logistics problem. The waste arises in relatively small volumes in millions of households. Finally there is the issue of food safety. More than half of the plastic waste we produce was originally packaging for foodstuffs. There are strict rules to follow in food packaging. Even if the polymers were well sorted, and somehow were given back to the company that made the original household item, there would still be a problem. The company probably could not use the waste again for a food contact application, since they could never guarantee that some harmful contamination hadn t happened.
In fact almost all the plastic recycling that takes place in the developed world is of waste created at the site of its original use; off cuts, bad mouldings, excess product production are routinely reused in the process which generated them in the first place. This is rather easy, since the identity and specification of the material is known with certainty.
Two developments are needed before mass plastic recycling can happen. First there has to be a way of getting the waste back from households to the plastics industry, at low cost. This might be a community collection system, or the agreement of supermarkets to accept plastic waste from their customers for recycling by their original suppliers. Secondly there needs to be the commercial scale creation of automatic polymer sorting equipment. Both these developments seem today (June 2008), to be years away.
In the meantime we have to support all special initiatives to collect and re use individual polymers or identical plastic items. Here is a link to a UK retailer that does just that. Have a look at their clocks made from recycled coffee cups, and their chair featuring recycled computer games consoles. They also have the answer to the plastic carrier bag problem. Made from jute! And a recycled Frisbee. Now that is fantastic.
Plastic Fantastic
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