How do we avoid plastics packaging waste?

While we the consumers, become more prepared to make the effort/pay the price to ‘do our bit’ for the environment when times are good, the prospect of ever tightening fiscal circumstances usually has the opposite effect. However, as evidenced by the number of people who now use a ‘bag for life’ or reuse bags at the supermarket, and the efforts people make to clean, sort and sift their packaging waste (free of charge) for collection, demonstrates that the public do care about the amount of packaging waste that we all generate.

There is a strategy of reduce, recycle, compost or incinerate plastics packaging. I have no argument with any of this.

The real problem is that until there is a fool-proof and comprehensively practical and financially achievable set of solutions, millions of tonnes of plastics packaging will still go to landfill.

Many differing statistics are bandied about, depending on which group is lobbying the solution. One of the biggest problems is the thin plastics film found on a number of household items – bakery goods, toilet rolls, grocery products and so on, which make up nearly half of plastics household packaging.

Even the new recycling scheme from the British Retail Consortium (BRC), which aims to address these huge volumes, admits that places to recycle this wrap are not readily available.

Furthermore, if packaging waste is not washed and separately placed in containers, the recycling system cannot handle them, and if any waste is placed in a plastics bin liner, that too cannot go into the recycling chain.

Two ‘solutions’ on the table and strongly argued for are oxo-degradable plastics and bioplastics. Regarding oxo-degradable plastics there are three key issues, as I understand them:

1. They contain metals, which are left as deposits after they have degraded

2. They break down to small particles of plastics, that may or may not be consumed.

3. They require heat and/or light to activate them, making them unsuitable for the recycling chain.

Regarding bio-plastics, some companies have come to the conclusion that a sugar cane or corn-based plastics is the solution. One large corporate has a goal that every single one of its products will incorporate recycled or renewable components and that, by 2020, 25% recycled/renewable materials is used in the mix.

This begs the question of how many hectares of land, and how many litres of diesel will be used, to cultivate, sow, harvest and transport the quantity of sugar cane needed? Add to that the energy required to produce up to 25% of the plastics required to make their plastics packaging, and at the end of the day it cannot go into the recycling stream after use. Is that what we mean by sustainable?

So whatever the eventual solution (incinerate, recycle, compost) while the infrastructure is put in place and the cost effectiveness worked out, there will still be millions of tonnes of plastics waste going into landfill.

There is a technology that renders plastics packaging landfill biodegradable without affecting the performance or recyclability or compostability. The technology that exists is an additive which, when incorporated into rigid or flexible packaging, will biodegrade in landfill and natural waterways. It will not leach plastics, is not PLA, not oxo-degradable, and is approved as ‘food grade’.

The packaging maintains the same properties as before and can be intermingled with standard recycling or composting streams and programmes. However, when the packaging does end up in a microbial landfill, as the majority will for the foreseeable future, it will break down into inert biomass and biogas through either an anaerobic (no oxygen, no light) or aerobic decomposition.

The use of the technology to make truly landfill biodegradable plastics really would be environmentally friendly. If not the final solution, it would, at least, be dealing with the ‘now’ while the long term answer is slowly implemented.

What about the cost? Everyone in the chain is trying to drive costs down, not increase them. But the cost is minimal and, anyway, can we afford not to?

There are new technologies coming on stream all the time, and recently I found a product that claims to do all of the above as well as to reduce the carbon footprint of the packaging supplier and to be cost neutral.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and may not be shared by this publication.