The can of worms that is soft plastic recycling
'Seventy per cent of soft plastic collected in supermarket recycling schemes and tracked after collection ended up being burned.'
You may have seen headlines like this in the news at the start of October, with a report by Everyday Plastic on the final destinations of the soft plastics returned by customers to supermarkets for recycling. 40 packages of soft plastic were tracked from front of store recycling bins in branches of Tesco and Sainsburys. Of the 17 that reached a ‘final destination’ point, 12 packages were used as fuel pellets or burned for energy.
There’s been some pushback, suggesting that any recycling is better than none; the mix of plastics that supermarkets take means it’s inevitable that there’s non-recyclables in the mix; that we shouldn’t give up on recycling because it is as yet imperfect.
Dig a little deeper, though, and a darker side to the scheme emerges.
Only a few years ago, consumers protested against the rising tide of soft plastics by taking plastics back to the supermarket and ‘dumping’ them at the tills, transferring responsibility for the waste back to the retailer. The new front of store soft plastic recycling bins immediately undercut this protest: protesters could be directed to the recycling bins, which in the case of Sainsbury’s promised, “the front of store recycling points will make it easier than ever for customers to make more sustainable choices by offering a trustworthy recycling system whereby they can correctly dispose of flexible plastic packaging”.
So what might consumers reasonably consider to be a trustworthy recycling system? Surely not one which incinerates/exports the majority of its recycling materials? And Client Earth are taking action on this very point, arguing that supermarkets are misleading consumers over the recyclability of their plastic wrapping. Consumer perceptions of recyclability have an additional effect: if a consumer believes the wrapping will be recycled, they are more relaxed about buying the product, believing that the environmental impact will be zero: according to Client Earth, ‘a 2023 study by the UK Advertising Standards Authority found most participants presumed terms “recycled” and “recyclable” were wholly positive for the environment; that brands were being truthful and transparent in using them; and that recycling was a circular process that always worked’.
Recycling this returned soft plastic also counts towards the supermarkets own targets for sustainability. Most UK supermarkets, including Sainsbury’s and Tesco, are members of The UK Plastics Pact, members of which are responsible for over 75% of all consumer plastic packaging in the UK. There are four voluntary UK Plastics Pact targets, building on government obligations already in place. Their 2025 targets include:100% of plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable. In Sainsbury’s latest (2023) report, 89.7% was reported as recyclable, and was accompanied by the confident assertion that ‘by 2025 our packaging will be fully recyclable’. In the same year, Tesco reported ‘96% of our packaging is fully recyclable through kerbside collection, recycling collection points or the soft plastic collection points in our stores’.
But ‘recyclable’ does not mean that the waste IS recycled, even through the supermarkets own schemes! And by describing packaging as recyclable, and aspiring to a 100% recyclable target, supermarkets are ignoring the extensive potential for reuse/refill and compost.
Another target is 70% of plastic packaging to be effectively recycled or composted. It is hard to see how this target can possibly be met, given the treatment of the soft plastics collected in store.
It’s worth looking at the geographical destinations of the various tracked packages too. Four of six successfully tracked Tesco packages ended up exported overseas, including to Turkey, and two of 11 successfully tracked Sainsbury’s packages were incinerated overseas. Two others were last seen on a motorway in Europe. So we are exporting our unlikely recyclables, and to countries such as Turkey, with well documented issues around the dumping of plastic waste. Human Rights Watch in 2022 found serious health impacts from plastic recycling there, with air pollutants and toxins emitted affecting workers and people living near the recycling facilities.
Incineration, even at waste to energy plants, is not recycling. The fact that plastics are made from fossil fuels means there are high associated emissions of CO2. Cory, a waste management company that has incineration for energy recovery facilities in the UK, analysed the waste it received to burn for energy in 2022. Plastic represented only 16% of residual waste by weight, but contributed 65% of the carbon emissions. Although incineration may be seen as preferable to landfill, a better option by far would be a reduction in production.
A generous interpretation of supermarket soft plastic bins would be that supermarkets are trying their best, that by encouraging consumers to recycle different plastics, they pave the way for a better infrastructure, where such plastics can be ‘properly’ recycled in a future closed loop system. However, they also (incorrectly) reassure customers that they are doing the ‘right thing’ by buying such packaging and recycling it, rather than moving themselves and customers higher up the waste hierarchy to look at reducing and eliminating packaging by reuse/refill options.
So what can we do?
At a personal level, we can still try to reduce the amount of plastic we bring home, by switching to refill shops, buying only unwrapped fruit and veg and so on. We can write to our preferred supermarket asking for detail on what happens to their plastic recycling, and lobby them to change their ways. We can lobby our politicians to bring in more stringent policing of that weasel word ‘recyclable’.
But the big problem stems from the producers - the fossil fuel companies who make the plastics – and whose production is likely to treble by 2050. It’s in the interests of their shareholders to push plastic production, and it will take a huge pushback to stop them. Of course some level of plastic production is necessary: what we must fight is the production of single use plastic, destined to be used once then become instant problematic ‘waste’.
In the UK, a packaging tax on producers was deferred in March: the aim had been to use the tax to improve recycling and also address plastic pollution, but also of course to encourage producers to use less packaging. With a new government, could we bring this idea back to the table?
Internationally, a Global Plastics Treaty is due to be negotiated at the UN in Busan in November 2024, and a strong treaty could do much to reduce plastic production wordwide. Inevitably, plastic producers lobby for weak regulation (200 lobbyists from the industry at the last round of talks in Ottawa in April, where the UK declined to support a proposed reduction in plastic production). Again, might a new government be more open to addressing the plastic problem at source? Let’s tell them what we want!
Plastic is a double edged sword: so convenient in use, but increasingly a scourge once it has outlived its usefulness. That can of worms is perhaps better visualised as a box in a supermarket full of soft plastics, opened to the elements on a windy day and the plastics swept uncontrollably around our planet. Strong legal frameworks might yet bring future plastic problems under control even as we battle to reduce the current impacts. We must do more than hope so.
https://www.everydayplastic.org/softplastic-pressrelease
Click from here to the full report.
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/act/lets-end-the-age-of-plastic/