Why can’t we recycle everything?

I’m often asked: “why can’t we recycle everything”? Often, the local council is felt to be to blame, but really, this quite reasonable-sounding question points to the centre of our misconceptions about recycling systems.

The thing is, when we put something in a recycling bin, that’s not really recycling. That’s just the start of a long, and often complex story of the journey along an intertwined, often multinational supply chain of materials; and that’s just for the main items in our household bin. Putting more exotic recyclables like electronics and textiles to one side for now and let’s just focus on stuff like cans, plastic bottles and glass jars. It sounds obvious, but I’m going to say it anyway: for an item to be fully recycled it needs to be turned into a new product. However, that process of regeneration is often not that simple.

Let’s take say, a plastic drinks bottle that we have diligently rinsed and put into our recycling bin for collection by the local council service. From there it is taken to a sorting facility (often called a ‘MRF’ or ‘materials recovery facility’) to be sifted out from the other contents of the bins and baled into compacted blocks of plastic bottles.

The next step of the process is where it gets complicated. This bale of our relatively clean, sorted plastic bottles now needs to compete on the global commodities market to find someone willing to buy it. This chain may involve a number of different parties who will buy the material, trading into different parts of the world as it goes until there is a trader who has a reputation for being a source of clean, reliably available material into the plastics product manufacturers. Along this supply chain journey, the bottles are at some point likely to be shredded and/or granulated back into pellets that are now similar to the feedstock created by ‘new’ (unrecycled) plastic that has come straight from the petrochemicals sector.

Only once the bottles have been processed, turned into pellets and then added to a manufacturing process to form a recycled product (often mixed with ‘new’ petrochemical industry plastic) can it be deemed to be recycled. From that point, it will re-enter the retail market as packaging or a new product for sale.

Plastics drinks bottles are made from a type of plastic called (HDPE: High Density Poly Ethylene) which is one of the more valuable types of plastic which can be made into a range of recycled products such as fleece jumpers, park benches and even new plastic bottles. this means that it is more likely to be successfully recycled as it is valuable (compared to other plastic types). However, mixtures of plastics, or low value materials like PVC or Polystyrene can’t compete on price with ‘new’ plastics.

As you can imagine, along this journey, there are various things that can go wrong. The baled load of bottles may be found to contain contamination (stuff that isn’t plastic bottles) and the whole load could be turned away and sent for disposal. Too much food in the load will go rotten and attract vermin, turning the whole batch into, well, ‘rubbish’ and it will get disposed of (sometimes legally, but not always).

The same principle applies to all recycled materials. There is a strong market for valuable materials like aluminium and steel. Metals are easily sorted using specific magnets and  the energy savings make them an economic no-brainer to recycle. Sometimes, markets can fluctuate and material value is affected. During the pandemic lockdowns, the shift to ordering online goods created a huge demand for cardboard and the price for recycled material shot up, making it much more feasible to recycle.

When we complain about the local council and their poor recycling offering, it’s worth remembering that they are grappling with global commodity market forces often way beyond their control. If we can’t recycle something, maybe we should wonder if we really needed to buy it in the first place?