On global recycling day
A case for refocusing our efforts on the things that matter
It’s global recycling day today. For most, that probably means a wholesome day of sharing some nice infographics on what we should recycle, reading some inspiring stories about how someone cleaned up their local area and checking out some art created from old plastic bottles and bags. If that’s what you’re hoping to see in this post, then I’d back out now.
This is going to be a pretty scathing review of what has become perhaps the most ubiquitous environmental practice around the world. In the UK, recycling has become such normal practice that anyone failing to do it will get some dirty looks and perhaps even a disapproving tut. Meanwhile, we celebrate when someone books a flight to some luxurious holiday destination and get excited about their new phone purchases.
There’s clearly a massive disconnect between our perception of what we think is harming the environment and what is actually harming the environment.
What we think is harming the environment
The media have been very vocal about single-use plastics over the last year or so, and there’s been an explosion of reusable coffee cups, paper straws and bamboo toothbrushes in line with this movement.
The reason they’re getting this attention — unlike a lot of the more problematic areas of climate change — is that they’re very visible which makes them much more real. We can see our drink cans on the streets. We can see our crisp packets in our rivers and oceans. And we can see single-use plates, napkins, cutlery and cups in our bins after yet another client meeting. And so it’s only natural that recycling gets a lot of attention as well, as it’s something tangible that makes us feel like we’re making a difference.
The truth is though that for all the effort we put into recycling, very little of it is actually getting recycled. For example, only 9% of our plastic actually gets recycled, and of that 9%, a lot of it is just getting sent to Malaysia to be illegally dumped anyway.
What is actually harming the environment
When we talk about recycling and plastics, the conversation often turns to the waste in our oceans. But if we don’t address the climate change problems caused by increasing carbon in our atmosphere, a few plastic bottles in the sea will be the least of our problems, and that’s because there’s a much more catastrophic mechanism at play: ocean acidification.
The oceans absorb around 1/3 of the CO2 we emit, which then reacts with the water to create carbonic acid, thereby acidifying the water.
So what does this mean for sea life?
If the water becomes too acidic, corals will begin eroding quicker than they’re being built. Animals like mussels and oysters will find it much more difficult to build their shells. It’s unclear what might happen to fish, but a drop in blood pH in humans by even 0.2–0.3 can result in seizures, coma and death, so it doesn’t look great. To put this into perspective, over the last 200 years the ocean pH has dropped by 0.1, and projections show that by the end of this century, it could drop by a further 0.5.
The good news is that the ice caps are melting, so there’ll be more water to absorb those pesky carbon emissions!
This is not a case to say that we should stop recycling altogether. What we need to do is to be more rational and pragmatic when it comes to our actions to prevent climate change.
A more pragmatic approach to recycling
In that spirit, let’s refocus our efforts onto the products that will get recycled, and to understand what those are, it’s important to first understand the recycling process.
When we recycle, the materials are sorted, cleaned, broken down into a form that’s reusable and sold. And it’s the last bit that people fail to appreciate in this process. I think there’s an assumption that whatever gets thrown into the recycling bin will be recycled, but there needs to be an economic incentive to recycle that product in the first place.
The recycling process can often be more expensive than the raw extraction and processing of the material, so we should prioritise the products that are most expensive to extract and process in the first place:
- aluminium
- glass
- clear, hard plastic (e.g. water bottles)
- paper & cardboard
On the other side, things that definitely won’t be recycled are:
- black plastic (usually very poor quality plastic at the end of its recycling life that’s been dyed)
- tetra-pak (a complex mix of materials that are difficult to separate)
- yoghurt pots (they’re made of polystyrene)
- thin plastics
Recycling is a good practice, but it receives an inordinate amount of attention and interest given the relatively tiny impact it has on preventing climate change. Hopefully this article has helped to shift the focus towards more impactful things we can do as individuals, and if you’re interested in finding out what those are, take a look on our website.
