Recyclable plastic is recycled lies

We’ve all seen the images. Sea lions trapped in discarded fishing nets. Whales killed by a stomach full of plastic waste. Birds unable to fly after becoming entangled.

And it gets worse once our drinks bottles & plastic bags start to break down. Called the chemical cocktail or white pollution, fish & prawns eat this plastic, absorbing nasty heavy metals, which in turn ends up in…..yep you guessed it – us!

Now I could throw facts & figures at you – like since 1950’s 8.3 billion tons of plastic has been made and then thrown away. And at current rates of production by 2050 13 billion tons will exist or more plastic then fish in the sea. We know there is a problem – the question is what is the solution?

Recycling Plastic?

Out of the 80 million tons of plastic produced per year just 14% is collected for recycling. The rest either goes into landfills, is burnt for energy or ends up inside Mr. Jaws or entangled around Nemo. Sad but it could be worse right? Not so fast…..

When recycling plastics - straight off the bat you loose 4% in processing old plastics. That's the act of heating, melting, stretching and reforming plastic into something else.

The remaining 10% becomes plastic products of similar quality / use and lower value applications (like a plastic bottle becoming a flooring tile). Job well done, right? Nope!

You see making something into something else requires energy – a lot of it. And this means burning fossil fuels which produces nasty chemicals which make there way into our precious atmosphere. You're simply exchanging one evil for another.

What about BioPlastics? Surely, our SAVIOUR?

PE, PP, PET (the list of P’s goes on)

Bio-based plastics sound very organic….as if they would kiss the earth. In reality however they are a mix of several materials – both bio-based & petroleum based. Some are recyclable, some are biodegradable and some use up to 60% less energy to produce. But don't be fooled……

Biodegrading is the act of reducing a substance down to its basic molecules like oxygen & CO2. This is done by millions of tiny organisms (microorganisms) that eat away at materials.

These organisms require heat to survive, namely around 50 degrees. Now unless you live in an Arabian tax haven, land based temperatures never reach such extremes so bio-plastics sit in landfills just as long as their ugly cousins.  And for our oceans, plastic has a nasty habit of sinking which means any UV / sun exposure (essential for biodegradation) is tiny – especially at 20,000 leagues under the sea.

What about PLA!?

PLA (enter boring scientific name) plastics have their benefits. Made from completely natural materials they cut out the need for petroleum based nasties and make them a tasty meal for microorganisms when it comes to disposal. However should you throw a plastic bottle made of PLA into your backyard compositing unit – you would need to wait over 100 years for it to vanish. PLA requires a very specific type of bacteria to biodegrade which can only be found in industrial composting facilities. These are normally few and far between and by the way PLA cannot be mixed with traditional recycling technics making 99% of existing recycling facilities unusable. 

The Final Solution

So it is all doom and gloom? Well not exactly.

Plastic for all its horrible quirks is needed in modern day food packaging. Break through innovations like PHA which can be grown and destroyed by bacteria significantly can reduce energy usage massively – once the cost of making it becomes reasonable.

Oddly however many believe the answer is to make packaging that can last longer!? It’s the idea that using a plastic bottle once leads to more needing to be made, which requires more energy to be burnt and therefore more rubbish in landfills and oceans. Reusing existing packaging multiple times which can then after its long lifecycle be made easily into something else or composited is being heralded as the new way to think.

Older ways maybe the new way to think.

Put it this way – when I was younger and visited my grandparents in East Africa, I remember drinking a soft drink from a glass bottle. 24 of them would arrive in a plastic crate and magically after they were finished, would return again, refilled in clearly reused bottles. You would go to your local food store, return the empties and get a new set. It was genius! Using the same bottles, the same crates with absolutely minimal energy consumption to provide your favourite fizzy pop – ecologically.

Maybe rather then spending billions on biodegradable, compostable single use packaging, maybe our scientific minds should invest their wonga in taking a flight to the developing world and learning from the past.

Pana Chocolate – a product represented by Global Green Foods uses 100% sustainable cardboard (no plastic). Obsessed with protecting our planet Pana Chocolate refuses to even use glue in it's packaging, opting instead for gum. And for every tree cut down to produces it's legendary boxes, Pana Chocolate plants another in it's place for truly zero damage operations.