2nd July 2025
Plastic recycling is now much more common place, with local authorities making collections of certain frequently used items such as plastic bottles, margerine and other food tubs, shampoo bottles etc. Soft plastics can be recycled if they are kept separate from more rigid plastics – and some supermarkets have collection points for these. However there is, apparently, no guarantee that plastics going into a recycling bin will be recycled (sometimes it is cheaper and easier to incinerate the waste which causes air pollution). Nor are there many effective closed loop recycling programmes – each a system where a plastic bottle, for example, is recycled and returns as a ready to use plastic bottle. It is often cheaper to make a plastic bottle from virgin oil based polymers than from recycled plastic.
These problems are a further incentive for us to reduce the plastic we use so rescuing the problem at source. If we don’t buy things that come in plastic bottles, plastic tubs and tubes, in plastic wrappers etc then we reduce the amount of plastic that is in circulation before it becomes a problem.
Further reading –
The Green Tau 