Why not just burn it all?

Used plastic that is:

The inevitable consequence of this simple messaging is that the retailers have to do more work: the plastic has to be sent for sorting because we are not sorting it for them. The valuable, high-quality material they are looking for (uncontaminated mono-material) is recycled, while the rest is likely to be incinerated or downcycled. That is a bitter pill for the public to swallow, when they have so diligently brought their plastic back. But it is understandable that the messaging usually takes the form of “please bring your plastic here” rather than the perhaps more truthful (albeit depressing) “we burn some of this”.

So where is the plastic sorted? Often in other countries where sorting by hand is cheaper. Once sorted, some soft plastics might be incinerated to generate electricity because it is not economical to recycle them, others are downcycled into bin liners, or the melted plastic is compressed to make alternatives to wood. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because soft plastic we have used once may be downcycled, or redeployed in place of a raw material. It is important to note that soft plastic is often deemed unsafe for reuse as food packaging because of Britain’s high safety standards.

Why bother with all of this? Given that lots of that plastic is burnt, why not just burn it all? For given the costs of that sorting - or that shipping to cheaper places to sort - we refuse* to believe that the “valuable, high-quality material” is in fact valuable.#

We’ve made this point a number of times over the years:

We put our mix of rubbish in the right bins,…. the economics make it difficult to justify the significant cost of collection, transportation and processing.

So, don’t. Recycling things where recycling them adds value is just great, it adds value. Recycling things where value is being subtracted just makes us poorer. So, why are we doing this? Why not just burn the stuff? And other than incantations about worshipping Gaia we’ve never had anyone give us an explanation as to why not. Perhaps someone would like to try?

*See what we did there?