Last night the BBC laid bare the problems faced by plastics being dumped in the environment in their Drowning in Plastic programme. Images of polluted rivers in the Far East, and animals feeding, unknowingly, on a toxic soup of waste plastic have become common place on our screens.
At Impact Recycling images of 2,000 tonnes a day of plastic flowing down a single river in Indonesia really hit home the scale of the problem. The sadness felt wasn’t just because of the damage to the environment — but also sadness from the fact that much of the plastic on view was readily recyclable.
70% of single use plastic is made from Polyethylene (PE) or Polypropylene (PP). 70% of the 2,000 tonnes a day of waste floating down the Citarum river simply should not be there. It should be being processed through facilities like ours in Newcastle UK, where we take plastic feedstocks commonly described as “unrecyclable” and turn them into a high value raw commodity used by manufacturers throughout the EU.
With our technology, the people of Indonesia and the residents on the banks of the Citarum are watching £750,000 a day worth of precious raw materials float past them.
You’re probably wondering why this plastic is not being recycled? Why are people allowing valuable products to pollute the environment? The answer is simply the lack of investment in infrastructure — not just in the Far East — but throughout the world. Even in the UK we struggle to convince local authorities not to take the easy option of bailing and exporting our waste.
Our recycled plastic goes to paint pots and cars, while other outlets for our recycled plastic are found in drainage pipes throughout the world. But we have limited capacity to make the huge differences needed.