Where does our recycling go?

Where does our recycling go? (Yellow top bin)

The domestic rubbish bin system in Perth should always have a yellow top recycle bin. This is collected fortnightly and is taken to one of two Material Recovery Facilities or MRFs for sorting. The materials are baled into the different types and sent to Asian markets, with the exception of glass that is ground into fine sand and used in road base in WA.

Until the end of 2018 at least half of the world’s recycling went to China for cleaning and reprocessing into products for us to buy back again. China then put the world on notice- no more recycling of most materials unless these was less than .1% contamination in the bale.

There was panic, as recyclers could not achieve this low level of contamination in the bales. Other Asian countries took up the slack initially but they are now pushing back, indeed returning many shiploads to countries of origin as they are just too contaminated.

Where are we now, in a COVID lock down world where ‘disposable’ is on many minds as essential and desirable? The Federal Government is currently (Nov 2020) discussing a bill in the Senate about banning the export of certain materials for recycling. While commendable that we deal with our own waste, we also need to encourage industry to develop markets for both the recycled material and possibly even a manufacturing arm for recycled products. But be prepared to pay more!

The reason for sending materials to Asia is a financial one, cheap labour with no extensive workplace compliance issues. We pretend this is all ok by not investigating the destinations but a quick survey of the incredible environmental pollution, particularly by plastics, shows not all our ‘recycling’ is good enough to find a market in these countries.

Another option developing in Australia, with WA at the forefront, is to use thermal ‘energy from waste’ facilities. This is useful for many materials with no viable markets such as mixed plastics, wood and mixed paper . Thermal energy from waste is a fancy name for incineration for the 2 approved facilities in WA.

They have approval for ‘residual materials only’. However ‘residual’ is not clearly defined.

Hence we need to focus on reducing what goes in all our bins, both recycling and general waste. It all costs lots of dollars once it hits the bin, whatever the colour of the lid!

How can we do this at home, work or play and who is responsible for change?