Is the ‘tail wagging the dog’ when it comes to recycling?

Regional director at PlasticsEurope Jan-Erik Johansson emphasised the accepted waste hierarchy, prioritising reduction and reuse if possible, with recycling as the third option.

"Energy-from-waste (EfW) should be the next option after all that can be economically and efficiently recycled has been recycled," he said. "But too often it is the tail wagging the dog, with retailers saying they favour recycling because that is what consumers want."

He added: "More retailers and brandowners are listening and starting to look at the facts. But if necessary, we will pull down their pants so to speak on this in public!"

As well as traditional EfW incineration for residual mixed and contaminated waste, he advocated the greater use of plastics waste in creating fuels for industry. "A segregated plastics-rich stream would be of too high a grade to go into standard EfW," he said. "We should be producing solid recovered fuel as a replacement for coal or using it for feedstock recycling." Johansson believes that if, as expected, volumes of collected plastics keep rising, there could be a return to commercial feedstock recycling. Unlike mechanical recycling, feedstock or chemical recycling involves breaking the plastics back down into their constituent monomers.

He also questioned the current emphasis on closed-loop or bottle-to-bottle recycling. "One key aspect of recycling is critical mass, and being able to ship a sufficient tonnage to a given location," he pointed out.

This may be possible with plastic bottles particularly polyethylene milk bottles or stretch wrap from the supply chain, he said, but not necessarily other plastics.