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.
March 2024
The image in our header this edition was taken by wildlife photographer Deep Kathikar. In the short video, a tiger cub picks up a plastic bottle from a waterhole - a place that animals go to drink.
Plastic monitoring data
We’ve collected data from over 353,000 waste plastic products in 32 countries using the Wastebase app. Each month, we publish a summary of what we’ve found. Check out or subscribe to our data report here.
Or, if you want to help us collect data by scanning plastic waste - get the free Wastebase app.
Earlier this year, Break Free From Plastic also published the result of their 2023 global brand audit.?
#BrandAudit2023 is back and once again, this year’s top corporate plastic polluters are @cocacola, Nestlé, @unilever, @pepsico, and @mondelez_international, and @mondelezinternational. It’s time to end single-use plastics, switch to reuse systems now!
EU Plastics ban
In early March, EU negotiators agreed on several measure to reduce single-use plastic usage. This includes a ban on single-use plastics in cafes and restaurants, restriction on fresh fruit and vegetable packaging and on individually sachets for cosmetics and toiletries in hospitality settings.
This upstream intervention has been a long time coming after many attempts to push plastic producers to take more accountability without legislation. This piece from The Guardian is an interesting counterpoint, based on a report by the The Center for Climate Integrity , and suggesting that petro-chemical companies have deliberately misled the public about the opportunities for recycling of single use plastics, despite knowing how difficult it is to achieve.?
In 1988, the [Society of the Plastics Industry] rolled out the “chasing arrows” – the widely recognized symbol for recyclable plastic – and began using it on packaging. Experts have long said the symbol is highly misleading, and recently federal regulators have echoed their concerns.
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 . @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 or beneficial) than the original product.?
What happens to all those soft plastic bags we drop off at the supermarket for recycling?
The Flexible Packaging Fund (FPF) is an initiative founded by Ecosurety and supported by technology firm Greenback Recycling Technologies to help supermarkets like Aldi UK track the recycling journey of their plastic waste from collection to end (new) product. This drive for transparency comes after years of reports of supermarket failing to track what actually happened to this waste once it had been sold off to a broker. Often, it ended up somewhere else in the world, dumped or incinerated. Consumers were being misled by the big ‘recycling’ bins outside stores in the UK.
The level of transparency built into the FPF is positive and, in Aldi’s case, the recycling is done in the UK by plastics recycler Jayplas .
Greenback’s main focus is ‘advanced’ and? chemical recycling. This is not a process that we at Unwaste.io support (along with many others in the circular economy movement). So good news for Aldi but we need more transparency and, (even better), more work to reduce the overall volume of plastic packaging in supermarket retail. Read more about the impacts of chemical recycling in this report from Beyond Plastics.
Another supermarket that appears to making positive strides is Lidl GB . Despite the many delays to the promised Deposit Return Scheme in DRS (covered in previous newsletters), Lidl has launched its own bottle and can return scheme in all of its stores across Glasgow.
The pilot allows shoppers to return empty PET plastic and aluminum drink containers via in-store reverse vending machines called ‘ Win-Win Recycling Bins.’ Customers get a 5 pence reward for each eligible item returned. Unlike traditional DRS, Lidl’s initiative does not require customers to pay a deposit on the product’s retail price.
…and some of the barriers to an effective circular economy
An interesting perspective from the 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. This report by Liam McSherry looks at how these pervasive products are complex and multi-material, but cheap enough to use once and throw away - so that's what people do.
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领英推荐
At a global level, a lack of recycling infrastructure is affecting the ability of motivated producers to use recycled materials. In the US, this report highlighted in Recycling Today suggests that, despite the enormous consumption of single-use plastic in the country, recycled-content processes are increasingly importing ‘plastic scrap’ to meet demand. This comes with associated costs and environmental impacts of packaging and transporting waste. Surely a more efficient system for gathering and managing waste plastic domestically could meet the demand?
U.S. demand for plastic scrap in 2023 outweighed the ability of Americans to place enough plastic bottles and other items into a recycling bin.
According to Houston-based commodities consulting company ICIS, the U.S. became a net importer of plastic scrap for the first time last year.
可口可乐公司 are facing the same issues according to this article in Packaging Insights. They’re struggling to meet their own commitments to using recycled materials as they claim not to be able to access a good enough supply ‘at a reasonable price’. One might ask what that ‘price’ covers - an investment in efficient collection and reprocessing infrastructure?
One of our core beliefs at Unwaste.io is that ALL actors in the global plastics supply chain should take responsibility for the management of plastic waste. After reducing plastic production, that means putting money into the mechanisms that enable recovery and reprocessing, to create a truly circular economy.
A view from Uganda
“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 an 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 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.
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 Foundation 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.
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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 Superfy .
You can get an introduction to 'reuse' approaches in this short PDF from @upstream_org : 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 @org_utopia .
And here’s a good introduction to the many confusing terms around ‘bio’ plastics (with thanks to PREVENT Waste Alliance , Nipe Fagio , 5Gyres, Impala Hub , FHNW).?
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/1629039398699388928
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.
Thanks
The Unwaste.io team
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1 年Thank you for the mention and reference to my vape work!