Waste and the circular economy
Unwaste.io
Building a cloud platform to connect everyone who can help reduce plastic waste entering our planet’s environment.
Welcome to our monthly round up of research, opinions and smart thinking about waste management, plastic pollution and the circular economy.
Recycling, downcycling, upcycling…
"Stuff is too cheap. ... you know, we don’t internalise the externalities of social and environmental damage from the extraction, processing and transport of stuff, we just don’t. And so we overuse it and abuse it"
A quote from a great episode from #CircularEconomyPodcast . Circular Economy Podcast @DrColinChurch of @iom3 speaks about the systems, incentives and skillsets around making materials flows more circular.
We see this with #SingleUsePlastic, for instance, in our work with waste pickers. Many have difficulty separating PP and HDPE - two hard plastics which are both recyclable, used to make similar products, and look and feel very similar.
Of course waste pickers can separate them, but this requires significant effort and time, which is often not rewarded financially by recyclers, so they don't. The result is that the resulting recyclate can't be used to make similar products - which leads to ‘downcycling’.
Here's an example from #Ghana of 'upcycling' - reprocessing a waste material into a product which is 'better' (longer-lived and/or more complex/beneficial) than the original product.??
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…and barriers to recycling
"The truth is most plastics are not recyclable. And because they aren’t designed for recycling, they never will be. Worse yet, they trash recycling operations."
An interesting perspective from Alliance for Mission-Based Recycling on how #recycling could work as part of a wider system, but cannot do so because waste streams are clogged with non-recyclable packaging - mainly for FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) products. Most of the clogging materials include #SingleUsePlastic .?
This report by Friends of the Earth sets out some of the challenges of hard to recycle packaging.? For example, crisp packets (or ‘chips’ for those not in the UK)? are normally sold in #SingleUsePlastic packages made of plastic polymer with a thin coating of metal - not easy to recycle.?
What’s worse than something that’s hard to recycle? Something that’s so cheap that people don’t even try. Yes, we’re talking about vapes. See this neat report compiled by Liam McSherry and flocq . Complex and multi-material, but cheap enough to use once and throw away - so that's what people do. ?https://www.canva.com/design/DAFXSqzNt8c/anO_vcJXomVv0I-yAElhHA/view
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A view from Uganda
The image at the top of this newsletter shows plastic bottles in the River Rwizi at Buremba in Mbarara city, Uganda (photo by Fredrick Mugira, published at https://waterjournalistsafrica.com/).
“A 2021 study by the GKMA PET Plastic Recycling Partnership found that about 79% of all plastic waste generated in Uganda is dumped into landfills or the environment, 12% is incinerated, and only 9% is recycled.”
This is engaging long read from Water Journalists Africa describes the reality of plastic pollution and waste management in Uganda, drawing on a range of data.
Through our free #Wastebase plastic monitoring platform, we publish similar waste data from Uganda (with thanks to our partners BioVision Africa). Our findings echo those cited in this article. The Coca-Cola Company is the top polluter in Uganda based on plastic bottles detected using our app, followed by domestic firms Hariss International and Crown Beverages Ltd.
The challenges of waste management are many and complex while the problem gets exponentially worse.
The Uganda government has imposed ‘producer extended responsibility as part of the polluter pays principle to ensure that those who produce plastics clean them from the environment’. However, ‘there is no implementation’ as producers have significant sway with legislators.
Read the full article at https://waterjournalistsafrica.com/2022/12/plastic-bottle-the-enemy-within/
See plastic waste data from Uganda here: https://wastebase.org/#/reports?report=mfr_in_country&countryCode=UG
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Plastic pollution in textile waste
“Although exporting of plastic waste is restricted under the Basel Convention and to be banned in the EU, 1 our assessments suggest more than 1 in 3 pieces of used clothing shipped to Kenya contains plastic and is of such a low quality that it immediately becomes waste”
One of the key findings of a comprehensive report by @changing-markets into the dumping of 300m items of plastic clothing into Kenya every year.
Read it here: https://changingmarkets.org/portfolio/fossil-fashion/? or watch the documentary.
The language of the circular economy
EPR, PRO, reuse, closed loop recycling - some of the terms used in circular economy discussions can be confusing. Here are some useful links to explain some of these concepts.
If you’re new to EPR (extended producer responsibility), here’s a good introduction from SuperfyOfficial: https://www.superfy.com/an-introduction-to-epr-and-pro-for-a-zero-waste-world/?
You can get an introduction to 'reuse' approaches in this short PDF from Upstream : https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f218f677f1fdb38f06cebcb/t/627ea09cf26b5a39929a130f/1652465828764/New+Reuse+Economy_Intro_Infrastructure.pdf…
Read more about 'closed loop recycling' in this article from Utopia: https://utopia.org/guide/closed-loop-recycling-how-it-works/
Microplastics everywhere
We keep up a Twitter thread of research around all the places that plastic ends up. Animal faeces? Sea anenomes? Human blood? Sadly the evidence keeps growing - microplastics are everywhere. Follow our thread here: https://twitter.com/wastebase/status/1523931122916368385
https://twitter.com/wastebase
Finally, thanks to Greentech Alliance for including us in their latest round up of companies involved in #CircularEconomy solutions across a wide range of goods, transactions and sectors, using data and tech to rethink product lifecycles.
If you’re interested in our data, we publish a regular free summary of plastic monitoring data collected through wastebase.org. It includes global polluter leaderboards, country analysis and our interactive map of global waste flows.
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Thanks
The Unwaste.io team