Have you ever as you wondered the supermarket isles, looked at a product and thought ‘’I can buy it and just recycle it?’’. Or gone to a coffee shop and forgotten your mug and said ‘’ It’s fine, I can still buy it and recycle the cup?’’.
Why am I asking? Well, when researching how to move into zero waste, I questioned whether recycling was part of the lifestyle. Through this I learnt a lot about recycling and the reality behind it, and so I am here to inform you on something you may not have known before.
What is recycling?
To begin, what is recycling? In simple terms recycling is a process that converts materials for waste into reusable products. Recycling includes the collection of the waste, sorting, washing, resizing, separating, compounding, processing and transportation to a new location. As there are many steps, it requires the use of large amounts of resources and energy.
When you throw away a plastic bottle, it first has to be collected and transported to a recycling facility. Then it has to be sorted from other recycled materials and grouped into the type of plastic it is made out of. The bottle will then be broken up into smaller pieces, and washed. Lastly it will be dried, melted and made into a usable form for companies.
Not only does it require large amounts of resources, but it gets tricky when it comes to plastic. This is because not all plastics can be recycled and not all recycling facilities have the infrastructure for every type.
Some common types of plastics include polyvinyl chloride for products such as food wraps, low-density polyethylene for plastic bags, and polypropylene for bottle tops. These types of plastic do not have a high recyclability rate. This means that many recycling facilities do not actually accept them, so next time, check if your municipal recycling centre does before disposing of these. This is because a lot of the times, if a recycling bag is contaminated with something that is non-recyclable, the whole bag will be thrown out.
There are more types of plastics such as those categorised as other plastics, including nylon and polycarbonate, which produce harmful chemicals and cannot be recycled. There are also types with higher recyclability rates such as Polyethylene terephthalate for water bottles.
I know that recyclable materials do not just include plastic, but I decided to focus on plastics because I believe that we are deep into a plastic crisis since its increased use in the 1990’s.
To show how massive this problem is, for plastic bags alone, we use 5 trillion a year! Making it 160,000 a second! That’s an average of 480,000 plastic bags since you started reading this sentence! These bags then take each around 480 years to degrade!
‘’According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, Americans bought a total of 31.2 billion litres of water in 2006. Most of this water was sold in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, requiring nearly 900,000 tons of the plastic and more than 106 billion megajoules of energy.’’
How much is recycled?
Now that we understand a bit more about recycling, how much is actually recycled? It is actually quite shocking, but a recent study has proven that only 9% of all recycling is actually recycled! The rest ends up in landfills and then into our environment such as the ocean. This is because small pieces of plastics are easily taken up by the wind and end up entering watercourses.
An estimated 93,000 to 236,000 metric tonnes of plastic enters the ocean from land each year! This ends up in the marine environment and is ingested my marine species. Turtles may for example, mistake a plastic bag for a jellyfish and either die from the plastic harming it’s interior or die from under eating.
Zero-waste?
So, is recycling zero-waste?
Well to break it down, zero-waste is trying to send nothing to our landfills. So, buying products and recycling them is not zero waste, as these products are most likely down-cycled (recycled into lower quality products) and eventually thrown into our landfills.
Still, I like to think of zero waste as a lifestyle where recycling is the backup plan, so barely anything is recycled. It’s not that I think that plastic or recycling are necessarily bad (although it may seem like it), I just feel like we have lost touch with what it means and how we should use it. Of course, with recycling there are benefits, such as:
Limiting the amount of waste that would enter our landfills and water
Limiting the resources needed to produce new products.
The fact that with one recycled glass bottle a single light bulb can be powered for up to four hours, and so on.
However, at the moment too much is being sent to recycling facilities than can be handled. We have allowed ourselves to use recycling as an excuse, and forgotten what the meaning behind it truly is. We need to be mindful when buying products and recycling, because the bottom line is that when something is recycled, it has to go through large amounts of processing until its lifeline is over, especially for plastic as it cannot be recycled forever!
Overall, it is Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, not the other way around. Recycling should be our last choice, not our first.
What should we do?
You don’t change to zero waste overnight, but you can slowly transition into a lifestyle where you are mindful of your consumption and go for products which create the least amount of waste.
When you are in a store, coffee shop, etc, ask yourself if you truly need what you are buying? Will it last you one second and stay in the environment for the next 500 years? If you really do need it, can you reuse it many times?
As you finish products such as a toothbrush, buy a bamboo one instead of a plastic one. Then continue with soaps, makeup, etc.
Buy a reusable mug, straw and bag.
Do not buy new clothes, buy second hand.
To decrease sorting time at a recycling facility, remove the cap of a plastic bottle as they are made of two different plastics.
With the image below, get into a habit of checking what type of plastic you have and how to recycle it. If it cannot be recycled, reuse it as much as possible.
7. Take in this information and do more research! There is so much more to this, and so much more information on how to move into zero-waste.
8 . Know why you are doing this and how you are helping the environment!
Overall, this is not easy, but it’s definitely doable, so start to do your part because we do not have much time at all!
There is a lot more that can be covered about plastic such as the material to make plastic, how much is shipped abroad and so much more. If you want me to write about any of these or anything else, let me know!!
Thank you so much for reading this post. I am still trying to find what style I want to write in and for now I will be testing things around, so I welcome any suggestions!
Thanks again. Feel free to subscribe, like and share!
Martina xx
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