Plastic recycling

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

UK plastics recycling industry under investigation for fraud and corruption

The plastics recycling industry is facing an investigation into suspected widespread abuse and fraud within the export system amid warnings the world is about to close the door on UK packaging waste.

The Environment Agency (EA) has set up a team of investigators, including three retired police officers, in an attempt to deal with complaints that organized criminals and firms are abusing the system.

Six UK exporters of plastic waste have had their licenses suspended or canceled in the last three months, according to EA data. One firm has had 57 containers of plastic waste stopped at UK ports in the last three years due to concerns over contamination of waste.

Allegations that the agency is understood to be investigating include:
  • Exporters are falsely claiming for tens of thousands of tonnes of plastic waste which might not exist
  • UK plastic waste is not being recycled and is being left to leak into rivers and oceans
  • Illegal shipments of plastic waste are being routed to the Far East via the Netherlands
  • UK firms with serial offenses of shipping contaminated waste are being allowed to continue exporting.
The picture shows mixed household waste, which had been falsely and fraudulently declared as plastic recyclables, arriving at a Brazilian port.

UK households and businesses used 11m tonnes of packaging last year, according to government figures. Two-thirds of our plastic packaging waste is exported by an export industry which was worth more than £50m last year.

In light of this several councils in the UK have now withdrawn plastic kerbside recycling schemes and are telling residents to throw their plastic waste into the ordinary bins for landfill or incineration to energy. Others are, more than likely, are going to follow with this action.

A recycling expert told the BBC that we should not even consider sending such valuable materials abroad but instead build proper recycling businesses in the UK so that the UK would produce its own recycled plastic. It would create thousands upon thousands of jobs.

Who would have thought? Well I have and said this for years and years already but, alas, no one wanted to have it. The same goes for glass in so many instances where it is ground down to “sand” as road aggregate rather than actually be turned into new glass.

Now that China is refusing to take the world's garbage for “recycling” companies are simply shipping the stuff to other. Mostly Third World countries which do not have any proper recycling infrastructure of any kind. But, out of sight out of mind and if it is out of the country what's the problem, seems to be the attitude. In many of those places the waste shipped from the UK (and other places probably) gathers unprocessed and leaks into rivers and oceans.

This was to be expected, however, as soon as the market, so to speak, in China was closed and waste exporters – which really should not even exist – were looking for other places where they could dump the waste.

As the recycling expert who has been talking to the BBC says, we should be keeping those valuable resources – all of them – at home and recycle the recyclables into new products here. It could create thousands upon thousands of jobs. But, hey, we can't possibly do that as that would mean investing to create those facilities. It is far cheaper to fill up some empty containers with waste and have that shipped across the ocean to be dumped at someone else's doorstep. Far too many rules to follow in Britain to recycle without contaminating the environment. It would be too expensive. That appears to be the attitude and government is not helping.

Every country should look after it's own waste, and recycle it at home, and not ship it out to become some other country's problem. There are only a very small number, probably less than a handful or two, of councils in Britain who do have their own recycling facilities to turn waste materials into new products of any kind. There are also but a few open market facilities in the country who do that. Those that make recycled plastic products, for instance, rely on the recycled polymer coming from China, and other places. In the UK we have the know-how, the expertize and the experts; what is missing is the (political) will to do it, unfortunately.

A lot of kerbside and similar “recycling” is no more than a farce as, in the case of glass, it is not being recycled but downcycled or in the case of paper, plastic, and other waste, it is either shipped abroad or if the market does provide enough return put into landfills. So why do councils go through this this exercise in the first place?

© 2019