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.
September 2024
Welcome to our monthly round up of research, opinions and smart thinking about waste management, plastic pollution and the circular economy.
In our header image you'll see one of the Upcycle It Ghana team using using the Wastebase app to record data from their clean up at Lambona beach. We'll be sharing some of the data from their audit in coming posts. Huge thanks to their team for their support in capturing plastic monitoring data.
Supporting informal waste collection
Over the last few months, we’ve been busy working with informal waste collectors using our Wastebase Deal service to sell their waste at fair and guaranteed prices.?
Many individual waste collectors live a few hundred metres from a collection point that is easy to access with a truck.
This 'last mile' distance can have a very poor road or tracks with deep sand, narrow stretches and many other obstacles which make it challenging or downright dangerous for trucks. That’s why we’ve been supporting MOZAMBIKES to develop a prototype handcart to make it easier to transport waste to a point of sale.
See our founder, Cameron, testing them out in this post:
Waste crisis
Many countries in the global south rely on informal waste collection. These workers are part of waste management systems which face an uphill battle. Annual global waste production is set to outpace our ability to manage it by 220 million tons. Swiss environmental consultancy and research organisation EA - Earth Action marks ‘Plastic Overshoot Day’ -? the point in the year when global plastic waste surpasses the world’s waste management capacity. This year it was 5th September.
Earth Action’s recent paper also reports that 66% of the global population now lives in areas where plastic waste has already exceeded local waste management capacity.
Consumer demand for change
In the global north, where much of the world's plastic waste is produced and profited from, packaging and recycling firm DS Smith reports that nearly a third of consumers surveyed were annoyed by the wrapping of fruit and vegetables in excessive plastic. One in four respondents said they’d avoided purchasing a product due to its excessive plastic wrapping.
We believe that consumer demand is vital in changing producer behaviour. Choosing not to buy something puts the onus on producers to change their packaging to something that consumers prefer.
We’ve recently introduced a feature in the Wastebase app that allows you to scan a product in shop, read about the producer’s sustainability claims, then email the producer to tell them what you think about their approach. We’re still adding producers while we test the feature but we’d love to hear from you if you’ve tried it.
And here’s a very popular consumer product - we’ve shared reports before about the LEGO Group’s efforts to use recycled materials in their bricks. They’ve now announced that they’ll make half the plastic in their bricks from ‘renewable materials’. This means they want to reduce the amount of plastic that comes from fossil fuels, and use more from certified renewable resin - in other words, plastic that comes from recycled or alternative sources and isn’t ‘virgin’ resin extracted from fossil fuel mining.
Ever tried to sell that IKEA Poang chair that you bought as a student? Now you can sell directly through IKEA Preowned. The furniture giant is trialling the service to take some control of the huge market for IKEA resale through sites like Facebook and eBay. Aside from brining some of this income back in house, they hope to contribute to sustainability aims by reducing the amount of waste products (particularly plastic) ending up in landfills. Let us know if you’ve tried this out.
Some hope in Scotland?
In previous newsletters we’ve followed the sad tale of efforts to establish a deposit return scheme (DRS) in Scotland. There is some hope in a different area, as David Burrows highlights in this post:
Olympics shambles
Anyone get to the Olympics in Paris this year? One of our Wastebasers did. We asked them to find out if was true that one of the Games’s lead sponsors, The Coca-Cola Company, was actually pouring their soft drinks out of single use plastic bottles and into reusable cups, as described in this piece from Politico EU. POLITICO Europe
“There are lots of refill stations outside the stadium and they encourage to bring a bottle. But in the stadium they do indeed sell the drinks decanted from plastic bottles into plastic reusable cups! I asked why - the server said it's because of the screw top being used as a projectile/in a catapult. I asked them why not have just dispensers (like on fast food places) for the drinks rather than bottles and the server said she had no idea.”
This ‘projectiles’ problem hadn’t been mentioned in the company’s press releases (at least not that we can see - many caps are now quite hard to unscrew anyway). They’d blamed the venues, the sports federations, ‘operational conditions’...basically anyone else.
Surely the biggest drinks producers in the world could pull together enough bright minds to get around the logistics problem? They can distribute their drinks to almost every country in the world, but can’t work out how to serve soft drinks in a specified area without single use plastic?
Data in e-waste
Our Partnerships lead, Laura, enjoyed catching up with Stefan de Linde from Minimise earlier this month. Like Unwaste.io, Minimise offers tools and services to track and monitor waste lifecycles. Stefan told me about some of the challenges of recycling e-waste, not least the many parts of different materials involved in electronic products. A lot of this kind of waste is sent to the global south for ‘processing’ - where there are different levels of capability to recycle different types of materials. Part of what Minimise does is find and connect the?infrastructure required to process e-waste. Read more here:
Not tried our app yet?
If you're interested in waste tracking, it’s easy to get set up to scan waste with our free Wastebase app. Next time you’re out on a walk or joining up a clean up, try scanning an item of waste and you’ll help contribute to our global database. We’ve already recorded data from over 5,000 products and more than 390,000 scans in 32 countries.?
If you need some help, have a look at one of our microhelps to get you started. We’ve got lots like this one:
Finally, check out our latest data report here. Every month, we summarise key data points like top polluters by country, global waste flows and brand breakdowns. Subscribe to get it straight to your inbox.
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The Unwaste.io team