Plastics: angel or demon?
Australia consumes around 1.3 million tonnes of plastics a year. The good news is that’s around 50 kilograms for every citizen, compared to around 70 kilograms in Europe and 80 in the US.
The bad news is that too much of it ends up in the waste stream – in Australia, around 600,000 tonnes of plastic material each year ends up as landfill or litter.
It’s easy to demonise plastic. There are well-founded concerns about plastic’s impact on the marine environment, while any windy day it’s common to see a plastic bag wafting through the air. As well, discarded plastic containers from food or beverages are all too frequently spotted by the side of the road or on the beach.
But Ed Kosior, owner of UK-based sustainable polymers consultancy Nextek, says plastic isn’t bad. In too many respects, it’s just designed that way.
“Let’s break down the usage; for every person who, say, uses 70 kilograms of plastics in any given year, about half of that goes to short-lived items like packaging. The other half is used in building products, automotive, electronics. It has a lifetime of anywhere between 10 and 100 years.
“Plastics are, generally, highly efficient materials and an important part of society; the problems start with low-cost materials in short-term applications where we haven’t mapped out the product’s lifetime.”
Plastics permeate almost every aspect of our lives. In terms of waste though, Kosior believes their positive role should also be recognised. “More impacts on the environment come from wasting food. While plastic, in many quarters, is seen as an evil thing, it’s highly efficient in reducing food waste.
“But what’s missing is the strategy for dealing with plastics at end-of-life. China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam – they’re still struggling to develop waste streams for their urban populations. Many people there still live in informal housing. They may have relatively low per capita consumption, but what they do use of plastics goes straight into rivers and seas.
“Waste has been an issue in the plastics world for a long time, but it should be recognised that it’s a big part of the efficient world as well – sewerage, gas and water distribution, extending food life cycles.”
Collecting plastics to create feedstock for recovery or recycling has issues with efficiency, cost and fragmentation, according to Kosior. He says targets for recycling are also historically ‘soft’.
“One of the conditions when PET (polyethylene terephthalate) was introduced was to develop a collection system; this turned into multi-material collection and became a recycling stream that was efficient for lots of items. We all started to pick up beverage containers.
“But bottles only represent a third of our packaging stream; we didn’t pick up film or other forms of plastic. Our infrastructure is slowly shifting to collect other materials – pots, tubs, trays – and there have been some important innovations that sped up the ability to process materials more effectively in response to the amount being generated.
““If you increase the cost of landfill, you immediately create opportunities for recycling. Let’s say the charge is $20 a tonne to go to landfill, but if it’s $120 a tonne, businesses may think twice and even offer the material free of charge. Suddenly another business gets a resource on a continuous basis and the ability to establish an enterprise.” – Ed Kosior
“And every country is saying ‘do something about it’ – they want more collection, more recycling, to hit better targets. Essentially in Australia I think we’re doing the best we can in a bad system – we need an improved collection system and a strategy for the whole sector.”
Kosior says the notion of producer responsibility hasn’t been taken to heart in Australia, compared to other countries.
“If you increase the cost of landfill, you immediately create opportunities for recycling. Let’s say the charge is $20 a tonne to go to landfill, but if it’s $120 a tonne, businesses may think twice and even offer the material free of charge. Suddenly another business gets a resource on a continuous basis and the ability to establish an enterprise.
“You see the dichotomy of New South Wales charging $120 a tonne and Queensland next to nothing. There’s a lot of waste, including plastics, crossing the border. Australia doesn’t have a national waste strategy. There are no defined targets that are meaningful or aggressive that give businesses looking for feedstock the confidence they’ll be able obtain more material, or for investors that the sector will grow.
“Go back 12 to 15 years ago, we had a much better situation, led by NSW and Victoria, but a lot of things have softened. We need to re-energise this through simple economic instruments.”
A global perspective
India’s population of 1.1 billion (and growing) generates 2.5 million tonnes of plastic per year – almost double that generated in Australia from a relatively tiny population. This, however, is subject to change. Ed Kosior says the plastic industry is growing at the rate of population – around two to three percent a year.
“Like China, India is on a path to urbanisation,” Kosior says. “People are moving from rural locations to mega cities; the income of rural workers will double in the next three years. As they move to towns, working in factories, they’ll start purchasing prepared foods. Countries like India lose up to 40 percent of harvested food through spoilage or wastage. Packaging will increase its shelf life.
“But as these countries get wealthier, need to feed more people in cities and use more packaging, they don’t have recovery streams. Basically the packaging went to compost, which was contaminated and ended up being burnt, contributing to air pollution. The world’s three worst cities for air pollution are all in India. Good waste management is missing in these developing countries. Around 70 percent of the plastics found in the ocean come from Asia.
“But while Europe and the US collect lots of plastic, most recycling doesn’t happen there – the materials go to China and south-east Asia. After they’ve taken what they want, they don’t have a waste system to deal with the residue. The informal waste system is the local river.
“Industry needs to pick up this issue, exporters of packaging materials to other destinations need to be sure whatever’s not used in recycling is responsibly disposed of or in waste to energy, not simply flushed to oceans. There is a looming crisis in that area.”
The state of the industry
Kosior says the plastic industry in Australia has a number of gaps in responsible product stewardship and the supply chain that need to be addressed.
“The National Packaging Covenant was held up as a way of handling the end-of-life issues with plastics,” he says. “I would say Australian companies can comply with environmental issues here in a rather superficial way; they lodge a plan, they meet it, everyone’s happy.
“Industry says ‘let us deal with the environmental issues’ and it gets done in a way that I’d call comfortable. Targets are set that don’t overextend anyone. It’s a contrast to the UK and Europe.
“The UK had to catch up. In 2004 there was very little recycling of packaging – around four percent of bottles. Now, 70 percent of bottles are recycled. They took a supply chain approach, working with the resin companies, the beverage manufacturers, the council, the retailers. They took the attitude that no negative materials should damage the product’s ability to be recycled.
“Suddenly people became prepared to invest in recycling initiatives; in 10 years the industry was transformed. The Packaging Covenant tried to do something similar, but hasn’t succeeded. Australia hasn’t taken the supply chain approach to heart; no one’s watching the process.
“In the UK, every package made carries with it a contribution from the brand owner for the recycling of that packaging. Recyclers are paid a credit out of that pool of funds.”
Are bioplastics the answer?
A rapidly growing area, bioplastics have attracted a lot of interest, but Kosior says there’s still much to be worked out.
“There’s a dilemma: despite the public perception, many bioplastics don’t degrade. They’re durable and that doesn’t resolve the problem of end-of-life. Other issues include those bioplastics that do degrade are degrading in the wrong place at the wrong time. We need functional degradability.”
Product stewardship consultant Helen Lewis contends that just because bioplastics are made from agricultural resources rather than being petroleum-based, it doesn’t mean they’re impact free. “The term ‘biodegradable’ is used too generically; the most sustainable types are compostable plastics made from a renewable crop such as sugar or potatoes using environmentally responsible processes,” she says.
“But compostable plastics are only good if they end up in compost. We don’t have the systems everywhere to collect those materials. Near where I live, Shellharbour Council is starting to collect food waste along with green waste, but we need access to widespread organic collections. A bioplastic ending up in landfill is not a good result.
“The recovery infrastructure is still in its infancy here. Gradually, we’ll see separate kerbside collection of organics for composting, or the development of alternative waste facilities where residual household waste can be processed to recover energy and organic material.
“We need to distinguish between two systems. ‘Technical’ materials such as glass, metals and most plastics should be recovered through recycling, while ‘organic’ materials such as bioplastics and food waste need to be recovered through composting. We just need to work out how to deal with the materials better.”
Lewis believes Australian business is generally not seeing renewable plastics as an opportunity; rather, its approach to the material is still being driven by regulatory and environmental controls.
“There is some innovation; companies like (Melbourne-based) Plantic Technologies are working to find solutions that provide enhanced performance in a cost-effective way,” she says. “They’ve introduced new resins that blend bioplastics with conventional polymers to meet specific requirements, but it’s a transition.
“Most companies don’t want to pay a premium for something more environmentally sustainable, unless that’s how they’re positioning themselves in the market. Consumers are also resistant to paying more. But there’s no doubt it represents a business opportunity. There’s a huge amount of R&D around the world, looking at creating biopolymers from waste materials and other more sustainable sources.
“But here, unless [renewable plastics] are part of the regulatory environment, things won’t happen quickly. While the EU is addressing plastics from a total life cycle point of view, including recycling and marine litter, Australia hasn’t quite picked up on that agenda.”
This article also appears in Issue 2 of Corporate Waste Solutions.