How Green Is our Parish?
The problem with recycling is that it’s so complicated – no, really! You have to put your paper in the blue box, your card separately, your cans & plastic bottles in the blue bag….
And that’s where we hit the biggest complication of the whole recycling thing – the plastic. What can we put out to recycle & what has to go in the bin? Ask 5 different people & you’ll get 5 different answers, but I’m going to try to steer you through it.
A few things to bear in mind:
1. All plastic is not the same – you don’t make bottles out of the same kind of plastic as you make yogurt cartons.
2. All plastic is NOT recyclable, even if it does have the recycling logo on it – in a lot of cases that’s just wishful thinking as lower grades of plastic would never produce more plastic cost-effectively if recycled.
3. When the council say they only want plastic bottles, they DO mean it!!
You see, plastic isn’t just plastic! There are different types, made of different chemical compounds, like polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyvinyl chloride polymer (PVC), polycarbonate plastics (BPA), to name but three. For simplicity these are usually coded by a number in the middle of the recycling logo, for example:
The bad news for those of us who want to throw away as little as possible and to recycle more is that only number 1 can be recycled in the former Kerrier area. Watch this space – or at least your recycling leaflets – as with One Cornwall things will change, but for now you can ONLY put plastic bottles WITHOUT lids in the blue bag. There is no point putting in anything else as the whole truck-load may be contaminated & have to be chucked, or it takes more time & man-hours to sort, pushing up our council tax…..
So, check your plastic. Number one – plastic bottles – can be recycled, and will be re-born as a lower-grade plastic with more impurities as, currently, there is no economically viable or safe way of re-creating top-grade plastic from recycled top-grade plastic. There is hope for bottle lids, however! Generally number 2, these are recycled by a single factory in the UK who does charity recycling – hence why people are known to collect them for wheelchairs, etc. I am (still!) hoping to collect these at church, so start stock-piling now!
As for all the rest of the plastic in your life, you have to throw it in landfill, so the greenest option is not to buy it in the first place. Keep as eye on what you are buying & see if you can get it with less packaging. And look out for poly-film bags that come with magazines in them through the post – some can be returned for recycling to the manufacturer (at your own expense!). Read the poly-bags for more info!
Happy recycling!
Kathryn Firbank