You religiously wash out and recycle plastic containers. But what about recycling soft plastics? You know the ones; the film lids, bread bags, and crisp packets. Look at the label and it probably says they aren’t recyclable. Why is recycling soft plastics so difficult?
What are Soft Plastics?
Soft plastics are lightweight flexible plastics. If you’re not sure whether an item is made from soft plastic, try scrunching it up in your hand. If it springs back, it’s soft plastic. Soft plastics make up around 15% of the plastics that aren’t recyclable at recycling facilities and many councils won’t recycle them.
Common soft plastics you’ll use at home include things like;
Many collection lorries don’t have separate compartments for the collection of soft plastics. Plus, if you put them in the recycling bin with your other plastic recyclables it causes contamination. Soft plastics aren’t usually accepted because they can get caught in the sorting machinery at recycling facilities. This causes jams and delays which makes soft plastics recycling more expensive and undesirable.
What is Being Done to make recycling easier?
If soft plastics aren’t accepted, this often means they end up getting thrown in our general waste bins. Then they end up on landfill sites. Because soft plastics are so lightweight, they get blown off landfill sites. Inevitably, they end up in the environment causing pollution.
Thankfully, some big names are stepping up with a solution. Last year, Tesco began rolling out soft plastic recycling points across 171 stores in the South West of England and Wales. Plans are in place to roll the points out to large stores across the UK.Tesco expects to collect and recycle 1000 tonnes of soft plastic per year through the scheme.
Customers can return all soft plastic, regardless of where they bought it. Items accepted at the collection points include cling film, pet food pouches, and crisp packets.
Oncecollected, the soft plastics recycling is sent to a facility where it’s washed, sorted, and processed before it’s turned into new packaging. The new plastics will be used to pack food and household and beauty products.
The supermarket previous ran a successful trial of the scheme across 10 stores. Customers returned more than 10 times the amount of plastic that Tesco was expecting.
The most common items that customers returned during the trial were:
Bread bags
Fruit and vegetable packaging
Crisp packets
Salad bags
Baby and pet food pouches
All the major supermarkets have followed suit and the Co-op has expanded its impressive in-store scheme. The retailer has recycling points at over 1500 of its stores. It’s also partnered with a plastic recycling company which turns them into post-consumer plastic granules. These will become items like bin liners, buckets, and construction materials.
You can also send soft plastics to the recycling company TerraCycle for free. How are you going to do your bit when it comes to recycling soft plastics and keeping them out of our environment? For more interesting articles on recycling and sustainability, check out the rest of ourblog.
Plus, if you put them in the recycling bin with your other plastic recyclables it causes contamination. Soft plastics aren't usually accepted because they can get caught in the sorting machinery at recycling facilities.
Soft plastics from consumers are one of the most difficult materials to recycle. They are frequently contaminated with food and often made from different types of plastics that are not easily processed. They can be recycled, but the system is complex.
Soft plastics are very lightweight and even when scrunched up they still contain a lot of air, so take up a lot of space. This means they are relatively expensive to transport, treat and recycle.
Due to lack of knowledge, different types of plastic are often combined in manufacturing processes, which makes recycling them much more difficult. This often leads to plastics being incinerated, which is a major waste of valuable resources. We have the tools and knowledge to create circular recycling for plastics.
Different types of plastic don't mix well when they are melted down and small amounts of the wrong type can degrade the quality of a whole batch, so plastic has to be carefully sorted first. In high-income countries, this sorting usually happens with the help of high-tech machines at large-scale recycling facilities.
Soft plastics aren't usually accepted because they can get caught in the sorting machinery at recycling facilities. This causes jams and delays which makes soft plastics recycling more expensive and undesirable.
Soft plastics can't go in your yellow lid bin. Put them in your red lid bin. Hard plastic packaging that keeps its structure or bounces back when you try scrunching it can be recycled in your yellow lid bin.
Examples of non-recyclable plastics include bioplastics, composite plastic, plastic-coated wrapping paper and polycarbonate. Well known non-recyclable plastics include cling film and blister packaging.
Only about 13 per cent of plastics are recycled in Australia and with major waste export markets like China closing their borders, there are too few local operators to handle the tonnes of plastic waste we produce annually.
This is because most of these kinds of plastics are made up of more than one polymer (lots of small substances that can be bonded together), making them harder to separate. We sort plastics by type because these different substances do not mix well when melted down.
Along with #6 PS (polystyrene) and black plastics, #3 PVC (polyvinyl chloride) and #7 PC (polycarbonate, not to be confused with #7 PLA, polylactic acid, which is a plant-based plastic) plastics are considered among the most toxic plastics to produce, and the most difficult to recycle.
"It's difficult to reprocess and sort through all the plastic," said Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA Senior Plastics Campaigner. Mixed container recycling bins contain a lot of contaminates that make plastic unrecyclable, she added. "Recycling is not the problem, plastics are," Ramsden explained.
Broken crockery. Plates and other items are taking up a large part of landfill everywhere, due to the fact that they can't really be reused for any other purpose once damaged.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated that about 9% of all plastic waste was successfully recycled in 2018. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimated that approximately 5% of all plastic waste was recycled in 2019.
But with that, comes an environmental price: Materials that make up plastic do not exist in nature, and therefore, can not naturally break down effectively. Although you can recycle plastic, it takes time to decompose, threatens wildlife, and spreads toxins in the environment.
The main drawback with mechanical recycling is that it changes the molecular structure of the plastic, in turn reducing its material integrity. As a result, recycled plastic is routinely mixed with virgin plastic to make new products, and even then, it can still only be recycled two or three times.
Recycling facilities are spread out unevenly, meaning that in some areas recyclable plastics cannot be recycled because there is no machinery that would allow for efficient selection and recycling. Recently, global economic policymaking suffered a large impact as well.
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