From the article: "70% of the soft plastic that reached a known destination was burnt, not recycled".
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.
In a world of climate change, best bet is too keep the carbon out of the air. That's why the landfill is the best place for plastic, where it won't bother anyone and definitely won't contribute to increasing the global average temperature.
What fraction of all total soft plastic is collected by supermarket take back schemes compared to road side curb collection (where only 10% of municipalities "support" its recycling)?
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.
No, the other 30% was "down cycled". 0% were recycled into something that had as much value as the original material.
I mean if you frame it like that sure. I'd frame it like: we extract dino juice that's hundred millions of years in the making, process the shit out of it to make an item that will be used once, and which we probably could get by without, then burn it
That's even better than you describe, it means that 70% is burned which is even better than recycled, and more than I expected.
I think the results of soft plastic recycling are highly dependant on the country doing it. In New Zealand, soft plastics are mostly recycled into fence posts, which last 50+ years and are every bit as good (or better) than treated timber [0].
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.
Plastic recycling is a drop of water in an ocean of plastic.
> 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...
Just a clarification: in NZ most soft plastics are sent to landfill, regardless of what happens to most of the plastic that is actually recycled. We're pretty bad for general recycling and really bad for plastic recycling. Most soft plastics here are from agriculture so it's probably a more solvable problem than if it was weighted towards domestic waste, but farming often manages to lobby their way out of regulation.
>which last 50+ years
So it takes 50+ years for UV, rain and wind to turn it into microplastic mush? Sounds like a great product!
Yes, very dependent on the market. In some East African markets that don't have much history of recycling, Kubik [0] has a neat model of employing folks to recover plastic waste from landfills which are then used to creating building materials
In Australia a company called REDcycle supposedly recycled soft plastics from all the major supermarkets. After a decade or so operating the business collapsed and it was discovered that they had about 11,000 tonnes of the stuff stockpiled in 40+ warehouses across the country because they hadn't figured out how to recycle it.
And how is that a bad thing?
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.
It’s a shame about Redcycle.
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.
Around 2015 China stopped buying much of the worlds' plastic refuse which caused most municipal waste recycling programs in America to shut down. Since then it's sort of just been thrown away because plastic is really hard to recycle into something equally useful, in a way that does not just add more pollution. Even LEGO won't use recycled plastic.
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.
LEGO is well known for using high quality extremely durable and long lasting plastic in their products so saying even LEGO doesn't use recycled plastics seems painfully apparent. There are other children's toy brands that do use recycled plastics.
The safest place for waste plastic is in a landfill.
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.
You conveniently leave out the negative effect of landfills on people and the environment.
Only PET can be recycled. Here in Zurich all other plastic is incinerated to produce power and the CO2 captured and sent to greenhouses and also sold to soda bottlers.
They do say that 30% of it is "downcycled" into lower grade products. That sounds like a win to me (although obviously not completely circular).
Trex makes composite decking planks from recycled shopping bags. Seems like a perfect use for the material. Its durable. It doesn’t have to be sterile or pure. Apparently 100,000 bags will go into a typical deck.
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.
> Seems like a perfect use for the material.
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.
CO2 is a major waste gas which can't be filtered. That's one problem with incinerating plastic waste. Being buried in a landfill, that CO2 wouldn't be released. The other environmental problem is that it's not being reused so more virgin plastic has to be produced, and that production process releases CO2.