Recycling: A great shining lie.

[bungeejumper]

Has to be recycled now and your not allowed to keep any plastic waste more than 12 months.
All has to be kept on record too, your really in the Manure if the farm assurance finds out you’ve burned stuff, £50000 fine.

Thanks, I didn't know that. Sometimes it's nice to be out of date.

Returning to the black plastic theme, our local garden centre collects pots and black trays and then ships them off in giant containerloads to a recycling plant that doesn't need to be told that everything is black, so it doesn't need to sort it by colour, dammit.

I'd imagine that if each one of the 80-odd plastic recycling plants in the country could be on Black Ops for a couple of days a month, a lot of this "machine can't see it, so we can't process it" silliness could be avoided. Mind you, that sort of commitment would mean involving the central government. Which would be the Ministry of Gove, of course.

BJ

[dealtn]

Returning to the black plastic theme...

BJ

Black plastic is often the output of the plastic recycling system such as we have. Proponents of eradicating it, as it in itself is difficult to recycle, cause the ironic situation of removing a product where much of the recycling of single use plastics can end up. Black plastic isn't ideal (yet) but it at least turns some single use plastics into "double use" plastic, which is a marginal improvement.

[JoyofBrex8889]

Returning to the black plastic theme...

BJ

Black plastic is often the output of the plastic recycling system such as we have. Proponents of eradicating it, as it in itself is difficult to recycle, cause the ironic situation of removing a product where much of the recycling of single use plastics can end up. Black plastic isn't ideal (yet) but it at least turns some single use plastics into "double use" plastic, which is a marginal improvement.

This just illustrates the pointlessness of recycling plastics: if the end product of the down-cycling is non recyclable then why bother at all? Better to reduce use in the first place than pretend recycling is anything other than sticking plaster on gangrene.

[paullidd]

Returning to the black plastic theme...

BJ

Black plastic is often the output of the plastic recycling system such as we have. Proponents of eradicating it, as it in itself is difficult to recycle, cause the ironic situation of removing a product where much of the recycling of single use plastics can end up. Black plastic isn't ideal (yet) but it at least turns some single use plastics into "double use" plastic, which is a marginal improvement.

This just illustrates the pointlessness of recycling plastics: if the end product of the down-cycling is non recyclable then why bother at all? Better to reduce use in the first place than pretend recycling is anything other than sticking plaster on gangrene.

Have you not heard of the 3 Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle?

or the 4 Rs, reduce, reuse, recycle, reclaim?

Surely turning single use into double use or better is a good thing?

[JohnB]

The black plant pot recycling story isn't really helpful. It relies on people classifying items, storing them separately and moving them to a recycling point. We could do that with everything in our waste streams, but it imposes work on the consumer and requires home storage. People buying ready meals don't generally want to wash, stack and deliver bundles of trays to a specialist facility.

All the complicated rules for recycling need to be done at a plant. Machines are best, but even human pickers are preferable, as they are more accurate and effective than us as home.

The black food tray issue is easily solved, make them very dark purple. Of course the manufacturers may already be doing this, it just takes time for the supply chain to change.

But what is needed is the EU to design a single set of rules for 30 governments to force each of their 200 local authorities to implement with a few 10s of thousands of packaging firms, not training 700m people.

A friend was exhorting us on social media to not put paper tissues in the paper box because according to a recycling etiquette site they are hard to handle. My responses that the waste stream processing needs to be more robust, not people more attentive.

[paullidd]

The black plant pot recycling story isn't really helpful. It relies on people classifying items, storing them separately and moving them to a recycling point. We could do that with everything in our waste streams, but it imposes work on the consumer and requires home storage. People buying ready meals don't generally want to wash, stack and deliver bundles of trays to a specialist facility.

All the complicated rules for recycling need to be done at a plant. Machines are best, but even human pickers are preferable, as they are more accurate and effective than us as home.

The black food tray issue is easily solved, make them very dark purple. Of course the manufacturers may already be doing this, it just takes time for the supply chain to change.

But what is needed is the EU to design a single set of rules for 30 governments to force each of their 200 local authorities to implement with a few 10s of thousands of packaging firms, not training 700m people.

A friend was exhorting us on social media to not put paper tissues in the paper box because according to a recycling etiquette site they are hard to handle. My responses that the waste stream processing needs to be more robust, not people more attentive.

Mentioned earlier in thread, but how about structural bricks, made from any plastic without the need to sort or clean as the process uses superheated water.
https://www.byfusion.com/

[Watis]

Black plastic is often the output of the plastic recycling system such as we have. Proponents of eradicating it, as it in itself is difficult to recycle, cause the ironic situation of removing a product where much of the recycling of single use plastics can end up. Black plastic isn't ideal (yet) but it at least turns some single use plastics into "double use" plastic, which is a marginal improvement.

This just illustrates the pointlessness of recycling plastics: if the end product of the down-cycling is non recyclable then why bother at all? Better to reduce use in the first place than pretend recycling is anything other than sticking plaster on gangrene.

Have you not heard of the 3 Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle?

or the 4 Rs, reduce, reuse, recycle, reclaim?

Surely turning single use into double use or better is a good thing?

This is the elephant in the room . . .

Once it's been made, it has to be dealt with, whether that's reuse, recycling or chucked in the nearest river.

Until we stop making unnecessary plastic stuff, we will always have this problem.

Watis

[Dod101]

Interesting point about a garden centre recycling black plastic pots because this year I seem to have thrown an awful lot of them away and they are perfectly reusable. They have only been used for a couple of months or so and a quick wash and they are just like new. I used to keep them on the basis that I might use them one day but......

Dod

[JohnB]

Garden centres have worried about the problem for years. But whenever they have schemes to wash and reuse they get overwhelmed by the numbers and variety of pots (as a dedicated pot hoarder I know), so give up. Its all economics, even a free resource is unwelcome if the downstream costs are high. I wonder now if centres are doing it as a greenwash loss-leader to get people into the stores.

It will be interesting to see how much the proposed bottle deposit scheme money is soaked up in collecting machines and lost retail space, let alone consumer time. But again supermarkets are taking on extra costs moving away from plastic for PR reasons.

[bungeejumper]

Interesting point about a garden centre recycling black plastic pots because this year I seem to have thrown an awful lot of them away and they are perfectly reusable. They have only been used for a couple of months or so and a quick wash and they are just like new. I used to keep them on the basis that I might use them one day but......

We have a permanent heap of the things lurking behind a particularly exuberant viburnum which conceals everything. I tend to keep the biggest pots and also the smallest ones, which are useful for potting on, and we send the remainder down to the garden centre once a year. I never tip them into the landfill bin.

I gather that some councils are experimenting with turning plastic waste pellets into bitumenised road surfaces. Then again, maybe I'll just turn my pots into a shed?

BJ