Recycling must be a good thing! However, commercial recycling may cost more in environmental terms than not recycling. Recycling has a certain 'feel-good factor' associated with it, and not recycling seems to cause people to go on a guilt trip.
Perhaps the best way to overcome the problem of what to do with waste is to reduce it. By that I mean encouraging manufacturers to produce less packaging in the first place. The best definition of packaging is that it is something disposable but persistent - a manufactured product so cheap and unloved that it is not worth the inconvenience of keeping it; but that, when jettisoned, obstinately refuses to disappear.
It's worth remembering the distinction between reuse and recycling. The UK government and local councils seem to use the term recycling for both. There is also a third "opportunity" available with waste, which is recovery. Some waste contains traces of valuable metals, for instance, that could be recovered and re-used.
But let's have a look at what's really happening.
What can we recycle?
Domestic waste, rather than industrial, tends to produce, on a weekly basis, the following categories of rubbish - organic, paper, glass, cans, and plastic. Let's look at each of these in turn.
Organic
Organic waste material - old unwanted food - can be composted. This recycles the "goodness", putting it back into the garden, and so must be a good thing to do.
Unfortunately there are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, food waste can (and usually does) attract rats. It can also attract a variety of insects - some of which sting. This means that people with smaller gardens or who have children playing in the garden are unenthusiastic about the proximity of rats to their home and family.
The second problem is that most households generate such an amount of food waste that they need more than one compost bin (particularly when grass clippings and other garden waste are added to the compost). This results in the garden filling up with composters - not the prettiest of sites.
Therefore, people prefer to throw away their organic waste.
Paper
The main raw material for paper today is wood pulp derived from wood chips, either from short-fibred hardwoods (such as eucalypts) or long-fibred softwoods (such as pines). Some paper is made using cotton fibres. Paper, on the whole, comes from "farmed" trees.
Papermaking is a dirty business. Paper mills are among the most polluting of industries, and huge energy consumers.
Strangely, paper is not all paper. It can be 20 to 40% fillers, coatings, and chemicals. Making paper requires a great deal of water, energy, and chemistry. Many chemicals associated with the manufacture of paper are toxic or result in toxic waste.
Although the recycling of waste paper requires less of all these, the chemicals used and subsequent waste produced varies greatly. The biggest culprit is the bleaching process. There are three basic types of bleaching: chlorine gas, hypochlorites (a chlorine derivative), and hydrogen peroxide or oxygen. Bleaching paper with chlorine is harmful to our environment.
It is suggested that producing recycled paper uses more energy than virgin paper production, is more polluting, and may make a greater contribution to climate change. Such arguments promote the view that it is preferable to incinerate paper to produce energy rather than to recycle it
Paper intended for recycling cannot be allowed to get wet, because people do not want to deal with it then.
Although old newspapers have been used for many years to make packaging materials, until recently they were not used to make recycled newsprint. This was because of difficulties with the de-inking process. Depending on the type of process, de-inking can range from a simple detergent process to a much more caustic process which may again involve chlorine or other more harmful chemicals and result in dangerous wastes. "Ink" from copy machine and laser printers is actually a plastic polymer burned onto the page. This requires much more caustic chemicals to "de-ink" than paper printed with ink at a print shop or with a typewriter, inkjet or impact printer. Printing inks may contain a variety of heavy metals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which require strong solvents (also containing VOCs) for cleaning.
The degradation of fibres during recycling also limits the number of times that a particular paper fibre can be recycled. Some virgin fibre or good quality waste fibres must be added to the recycled pulp to improve the quality of the recycled product.
Paper can be recycled into a wide variety of paper and other cellulose products. Contamination problems limit its reuse in food packaging such as milk cartons, and the degradation of fibres (during recycling) mean that used paper is generally 'down graded' as it is recycled. Thus, old newspapers cannot be used to produce high quality printing and writing papers, but they can be used in applications requiring mechanical pulp, such as newsprint and tissue.
Many of the recycled papers on the market are essentially fake - made with materials that never left the mill or the converter (where paper is cut into sheets or envelopes). These types of waste have historically been reused in papermaking. So nothing new is happening except a label. (It's good this material is being reused, but it simply doesn't meet the public perception of recycling.)
So with problems with getting wet, removing the ink, and chemicals to get it in a state for its downgraded new life, the best thing that can be done with a used sheet of A4 paper is to send it to the local playgroup for them to use the back as drawing paper. Otherwise, incinerate it to make heat in power plants - rather than using coal or oil.
Glass
Glass bottle are collected from bottle banks. The broken glass, known as cullet, is then taken to one of a very few recycling depots, a journey of possibly 200 miles. At the depot the cullet is melted down and mixed with raw materials to make new glass bottles and jars.
The use of a percentage of cullet in the manufacturing process allows some savings to be made in raw materials, energy, and water. However, glass is heavy and the raw materials are cheap. The small energy benefit of using cullet is more than offset by its higher cost. The higher price tag for cullet stems from the transportation and separation costs associated with glass recycling.
Compare this with the typical life-cycle of the reusable milk bottle. The bottle belongs to a dairy. It's filled with milk and delivered to the customer's door. When empty, it is rinsed and left outside to be collected by the milkman, and returned to the dairy; here it is washed and refilled with milk. This uses about five per cent of the energy needed to make a new bottle. On average, a milk bottle makes about seventeen journeys in its lifetime.
Cans
It is convenient to split cans and other metal containers into three categories - ferrous, non-ferrous, and precious. Ferrous metals are those that contain iron. They are cheap and recycled in huge quantities. Non-ferrous metals are those with no iron: they include copper, aluminium, lead, etc, and quantities are much smaller. Notice that there is no tin in cans these days! Precious metals include gold, silver, platinum, etc, and just a few grams may be very valuable.
Ferrous cans are separated either by hand or with magnets.
Aluminium cans are first sorted and then baled into bricks. The bricks are transported to processing plants.
It's the sorting and transportation costs that make recycling cans uneconomic.
Plastic
There are about 40 different plastics or polymers used today. Each has a different chemical composition and set of properties that makes it suitable for certain applications. The problems posed by recycling are especially severe for plastics. There are many different grades of plastics and most of them do not mix well. Plastic bottles cannot be mixed with yoghurt pots. If plastics are to be recycled, they need to be sorted first and recycled separately. The sorting of plastics, however, is both labour intensive and costly.
The combination of several plastic resins in a single product and the introduction of plastic composites, to approach the strength of cast metal, has caused recycling problems.
Although most plastics can be recycled, because of the difficulty in collecting, sorting, cleaning, and reprocessing, at present it is only economically viable to recycle three types of plastic from domestic sources:
To reprocess the plastic:
When glass, paper and cans are recycled, they become similar products, which can be used and recycled over and over again. With plastics recycling, however, there is usually only a single re-use. Most bottles and jugs don't become food and beverage containers again. For example, drink bottles might become carpet or stuffing for sleeping bags. Milk jugs are often made into plastic lumber, recycling bins, and toys.
At this time, plastic recycling only minimally reduces the amount of virgin resources used to make plastics.
Other costs
The money spent collecting, transporting, and reprocessing frequently makes the recycled material more expensive than the original material.
The financial cost of recycling generally comprises three factors: the energy, the plant, and the labour involved in collecting, sorting, and processing the material. Of these, energy and plant exact an environmental toll, while labour on the whole does not. Labour, however, is expensive; in their attempts to cut costs, recyclers will invest in specialized high-tech machinery.
Because recycling is uneconomic and recycled materials must be sold at a loss to manufacturers, landfilled, or dumped in the Third World, the recycling procedure must be subsidized - and nearly always is, either by industry itself or by government.
Recycling takes time to sort and dump items. Usually, this also means a loss of finances somewhere. Someone has to be paid for the time it takes to sort the items.
Disadvantages of recycling
The reprocessing of recovered materials is not always pollution free. Certain reprocessing technologies create residues that are difficult to treat. The acid-clay process for rerefining waste oil is one example where the residual sludge has contaminated land. Whether the use of recycled material is less polluting than virgin material can only be assessed on a project by project basis.
The effects of de-inking and repulping wastepaper are relatively benign, using currently available technology and modern inks, which do not contain heavy metals, but de-inking does produce salt in effluent. The location of de-inking facilities and the policies adopted to manage salinity problems are therefore important in assessing the environmental effects of paper recycling.
The costs of collection, transport, and reprocessing may be a disadvantage. This also results in higher costs for recycled materials.
The emphasis upon packaging means that a great deal of effort goes into extending the recycling of materials which account for only one tenth of total urban waste by weight. It also means that the focus is upon products such as PET bottles, which are conspicuous in litter, even though they form a small part of the waste stream and do not have major adverse environmental effects. Some of these recycling schemes may bring no net gain to the community.
Bottom line
The feel-good factor associated with recycling is based on belief rather than reality. The economics show that recycling is not always cost effective and there are hidden dangers to the environment. Reduction in the amount of packaging would help. Recycling is a possibility that is not economically viable generally. Reuse seems to be a sound solution where possible. Recovery can be economic for some products. It can (and more often than not does) cost more to recycle (because of collection, transport, and reprocessing costs) than not.
Where do you want to go next?
©2003 Trevor Eddolls