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Tag : recycling pp

WHILE reduced rubbish collections become the norm, the mountain ofplastic from packaging doesn’t seem to be shrinking at thesame rate.
Our picture, top centre, shows the typical amount of non-recyclableplastic packaging for two people over the space of a week living inSefton.
Like in any household, the kitchen bin has been overflowing withtrays and plastic wrappers from meat, fruit, biscuits andvegetables and ready meals, and margarine and dessert pots.
“My bin is full every week, and if anything I buy food withless packaging on it if I can,” says Pauline Balmer, 59, fromFormby. “I hate throwing so much away, but I don’t knowwhat else to do with it.”
When you multiply her situation by the number of UK households, thestatistics become disturbing.
Across the UK we chuck out nearly 3m tonnes of waste plastic peryear.
More than half of that is used packaging, and three-quarters of itis from households. It is estimated that only 7% of total plasticwaste is currently being recycled.
But it’s not merely a question of goodwill and individualeffort. Across the region, the picture of what plastic the councilwill collect from our homes varies dramatically.
No plastics at all are collected from households for recycling inSefton. Green-minded residents in Neston, however, see margarinepots, microwave trays and all manner of lightweight plasticpackaging taken away.
Recycling across Knowsley, Liverpool and Wirral is co-ordinated bythe Merseyside Waste Disposal Authority, and the first stop for therubbish they handle is the enormous material recycling facility(MRF) at Bidston.
Since 2006, vast amounts of recyclables are separated into theirconstituents using magnets, gravity, density tests and manuallabour. It is highly efficient at collecting the materials it doesrecycle, but the only plastic it takes is bottle-shaped. They areremoved from the waste stream, baled up and sent on to reprocessorsto be sorted again and turned into something new.
But why just bottles?
“They decided on bottles when the specification for the plantwas made, because they were easy to handle in terms of technology,and there was a market for them,” explains Alex Murray,assistant director of operations at MWDA. “For otherplastics, there’s virtually no-one to sell them on to. Wecan’t collect everything, but what we do is clean anduseable. It’s a big myth that everything isrecyclable.”
Household recycling in earnest began after 2002, when the EU LandDirective set stringent targets to reduce rubbish going tolandfill, implemented by local councils via weight-based recyclingtargets and starting at 25 per cent of all rubbish by 2005.
Inevitably, councils first favoured the heavier items. After glass,tin and paper started to be collected, plastic bottles were“the lowest hanging fruit” according to Recoup, theUK’s not-for-profit household plastics recyclingorganisation.
Made mainly of tough polyethylene terephthalate (PET or number 1 inthe group of seven plastic categories which is listed on theproduct underside), or the chemical resistant, waxy, high densitypolyethylene (HDPE or 2), plastic bottles proved relatively easy tosort. Businesses started investigating ways to find uses for theend material. One in three bottles are now recycled and used tomake things like fleeces and even new pop bottles, creating thesought after “closed-loop” in production.
Another attractive feature of bottle recycling is that councils canpick up £130 per tonne to offset collection costs. Butextending plastic collections has its challenges.
“The thing is the weight of plastics,” admits aspokesperson for Sefton MBC. “You need so much of it to makea tonne, because plastic is so much lighter. You have to put somuch in a wagon, it doesn’t weigh up.”
Centriforce, based on Liverpool’s Derby Road, can’t getenough plastic bottles, and turns industry packaging into plastichoardings, weatherproof plastic boardwalks, kitchen counters andtables.
Recycling other common household plastics, like the polypropylene(PP or number 5) used for yoghurt pots and microwave trays, is,says commercial manager Barry Neeling, currently a “chickenand egg” situation.