Where Does All Your Recycling Really Go?

really happens to that thing? Like a lot of people, I try to do my part by recycling, but I always do wonder how much, if any of that plastic I dutifully placed at the curb each week he has ever really turned into something else. The good news is today's show answers that question. The bad news you are not going to like the answer. No one voted for more plastic in our lives, but we are buried in

plastic because it's cheap. That's Judith inc. She's a former administrator with the US Environmental Protection Agency and now she's president of Beyond Plastics. That's a group in Vermont that advocates for less plastic waste. Plastic production will double in the next twenty years, and at the same time, plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure. I asked Judith for

a quick explainer on why that is. Plastics traditionally have been made from chemicals and oil, but now it's mostly made from chemicals and ethane, which is a waste product of gas hydrofracking. So what once was a waste that was flared in to the atmosphere is now in a few instances, being captured and sent by pipeline two new gigantic plastic production facilities with the funny name of ethane crackers.

So the gas is heated at a really high temperature and cracked, and then billions of little plastic pellets are created that's then used to make single use plastic packaging. Everyone should keep recycling paper, metal, glass, and only plastic that has the little tiny number on the bottom, number one or number two. Those are resin codes. But most

plastics in the United States does not get recycled. So now we see a massive amount of plastic waste going to Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey and more recently Africa. You have talked about how only plastics that have that number one or number two in the little recycling triangle that we see on all the plastics um that only those are recycled. So why don't we just make all

the plastic out of oaks. We could. We have to create a law to require it though, you know, and I want to explain why we have such an abysmally low recycling rate for plastics. If you have a newspaper, you can put that newspaper when you're done reading it into your recycling bin. Chances are it will get recycled into a new newspaper or a cardboard box, and it can be recycled, not forever, but a significant time. It can go around. Aluminum can can get recycled into aluminium can.

The challenge with plastics is there are hundreds of different types of plastics. Um They're all different resins, they all have different toxic chemical additives and different colorance. So think of your own home. You might have a bright orange hard plastic detergent bottle near your your washing machine, and then your refrigerator might have a squeezeable clear soft ketchup bottle.

You can't recycle those two types of plastics together. Um, the recycling process for plastics just doesn't work because it's such a heterogeneous waste stream. So number one and number two plastics do have a market, particularly beverage bottles that have deposits on them, because that material is kept separate

and clean. So your idea is a good one, but it would be fought vigorous sleep by Big Plastic because they want to be able to make any kind of plastic, any color, any chemical additive and sell it to you and I. The problem is once they sell it to us, their responsibility ends, and then you and I as taxpayers are stuck with the cost of properly collecting, processing, and disposing of all of this. Judith, thanks thanks for coming

on the show by pleasure. So if a lot of the plastic we throw away can't be recycled, where does it go? Kitch chollel and investigative reporter for Bloomberg, said out to find the answer to that very question, and he joins me now from London. Hey Wes So Kate, you and voice like Muskva, your Bloomberg colleague, actually set out to find out what actually happens that bag when you put it in the recycler, and you went about it in a clever way. Can you describe what you did? Well?

We we had an enticing mystery to unravel, really, which is, you know what happens to this stuff once we put it in the trash can? And you know, I had I did some researching online and I made a few phone calls, and it was incredibly difficult to get a clear answer that no one really seemed to know, not the waste companies, not the consumer companies that sell plastic goods.

It was all a bit uncertain. And I've heard rumors from environmental activists that most of it, most of the UK's supermarket trash goes to Poland, or a significant portion of it goes to Poland. Um. But you know, I couldn't be certain. I figured the only way to know for sure, the only way to really get that answer

would be to track it. Yeah, I wanted to look at Tesco, which is the UK's biggest supermarkets chain, and it also is one that makes a big play of its recyclability to recycle soft plastics, which are really hard to recycle anywhere. Are they so hard to recycle soft plastic, you know it's it's because they are a mess of different um chemicals and products all blended together for specific purposes.

There's not one type of plastic. There's you know, several different kinds, and each of them contain different additives, and all those additives have to be either taken out um or combined together to make a good quality recycled plastic. If you just take a bunch of soft plastic stuff and put it together and try to recycle it, what comes out is unusable good um. So it all has to be separated, It all has to be has have all chemical chemical additives cleverly taken out, and it's a

really difficult process. It's a reason why only about one or two percent of that stuff, even in the in Europe gets recycled. So I picked up a Tesco plastic bag um some some clear soft plastic that was wrapped around a bit of lettuce and a lentil puff wrapper, and I glued or taped tiny digital trackers into each of them, and I deposited them at three different Tesco stores in London, and then I spent the next two weeks glued on my phone. When you say you deposited

them at the stores. They were recycling bins out the store where you put it in, and then the assumption is they're going to take it away and recycling. Exactly, they they invited their customers to to to bring back their soft plastics and put them in these special white bins displayed prominently at the front of the store with the idea that they would be recycled and so the so the assumption is they're going to be taken someplace in London or close by and there's a recycling facility.

None of us really knows. Frankly, none of us is really asking that many questions because we're just assuming that somebody else is going to take care of this problem for us. But the natural assumption is that your plastic packaging is going to get turned into new plastic packaging. That's what most people understand by recycling. You know, my bottle is going to become a new bottle, my crisp wrapper will become a new soft plastic wrapper. Turns out

that wasn't the case. So so exactly where did you find you've keaped glued all these old trackers in and sent them on their way, And then what did you do. I watched them ping across Europe. Basically, the first one circled the M twenty five, which is a ring road around London, and then disappeared in the middle of the Thames Um. To this day, I have no idea what happened to it. I can only assume that it was shaken off a lorry or something and and just made

its way into the waterway. But the other two um also circled d M twenty five, and then they went to the UK's biggest port, which is at Felix s though a place called Harridge Um. And then and I could see them boarding a ferry terminal and they were shipped over to the Netherlands, both of them together. They were in the same load. They weren't in the same load. They took the almost exact same routes at a couple

of days apart. So there was obviously a network here of of of trash coming from the TESCO system going through this this specific port and then going to the same place. And I watched these things ping their way across Europe. They quickly went through the Netherlands. They crossed Germany west to east in the space of about twenty four hours, and then both trackers landed at the exact same spot in Poland, which is a small town called Jellonnagora.

After the break, my conversation with kitsch Ale continues. Now Poland, Why Poland? That's that's the big question, you know, why why would you expend all these resources shipping plastic garbage from London to Poland? And the simple answer is that it's much much cheaper to dispose of plastic waste Poland that is in the UK. Now is the assumption that that was the end of this experiment, that that is where these plastic ams wound up? Yeah, I had a

feeling wasn't the end of the journey. We actually, me and my colleague Void check we we we visited the site in Jelonne a Goa, which is a vast warehouse with plastic piled up outside um and it was pretty clear that they weren't doing the recycling in there. You know, it didn't have a huge amounts of industrial machinery or smokestacks coming out. What it looked like was it was a massive storage depot and we learned that that that

actually was the case. Jelenaga is a stopover points of plastic on the way somewhere else, and so both bits of plastic that ended up there stayed there for a couple of weeks and then moved on somewhere else. I imagine you went to Tesco and showed them your findings.

What did they say. Tesco stance is that they have a relationship with a supplier who handles this waste for them, that they regularly check the supplier to ensure that the waste is being disposed of properly, and that all the garbage that they collect is you know, is sent to

a recycling center as best they can work out. So what they do is they contract with another supplier and then the supplier certifies to them that it's being handled correctly, and from there tescos view is that the responsibility for the plastic has been satisfied. Exactly Kit you happened to put these trackers in uh Tesco bag. But we should say that Tesco is just one of thousands and thousands of places where you can find these bags that everyone,

every retailer, everyone uses them. Yeah, that's right. Test Tesco isn't the only company doing this. In fact, the idea of soft plastic recycling came from the major U. S. Supermarket chains, where you can still there are places where you can deliver your soft plastics outside store. It's an appealing solution because it means that they can attempt to affect change without relying on local government or local companies to collect the waste for them. It gets delivered to

their doorstep. So was that the end of the journey through these trackers or did they continue to move on from Poland to other countries. The trackers continued to work, and we watched one of them travel all the way across West Poland's through to the east to another small town where they were delivered to an industrial facility and then disappeared. We suspect they were burned for energy there, although we don't know for sure. And the other tracker

took a much more interesting routes. It went dead for several weeks and then it finally pinged its location in southern Turkey. In southern Turkey, yeah, and that's where it met its end. The tracker, at least, I wish I could say that I knew that was the case, but we again, we we sent a reporter to the site where where the tracker was pinging its location from and there was a huge pile of terrible quality mixed plastic

dumped in a yard I say dumped. We spoke to someone who said that they had bought the plastic from a waste proka and they were planning to sell it on for recycling purposes. So it could have gone to a recycler in Turkey. Um, it could have been exported again to a recycler in Asia. UM. Frankly, no one knows for sure. We'll never know the answer. It could also have just been buried or dumped or burned. We don't know. Kitchell, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks

a lot coming up. That plastic bags journey doesn't end there. That's after the break. I'm joined by Matt Campbell, Asia editor for Bloomberg Business Week. He is based in Singapore. Matt, thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for

having me with Now. We've been talking today about the very strange and convoluted path that plastics, that plastic ballow of your throwaway takes throughout the world after you put it in what you think has recycling been uh and often winds up in a big pile halfway around the world, and you went out to actually see what that looks like when all of this trash reaches the end of the line and you went to Thailand, can you just describe what you saw, because it is really something that's

right west. So, something that I didn't know about the plastic industry and really the waste industry generally, is there is a huge long haul waste export trade. So I visited recycling facilities around Thailand, mostly in the industrial belt that extends from Bangkok along the coast, where there is very large and very profitable recycling industry that is based partly, not entirely, but to a substantial effect on imported waste

from elsewhere in the world. So these are huge loads of plastic that come from in the main wealthier countries and are sent to Southeast Asia to be dealt with MATT. So, when you went to Thailand and you saw the effects of all of these bottles and other uh throwaway containers that ended up in Thailand, what did you see? What did it actually look like? Well? I did get some glimpses of what the recycling industry really looks like in practice.

There was one moment which was really kind of unforgettable seeing a woman, a middle aged thie woman in sort of covered up head to toe guests to avoid getting gunk on her, just sitting in a huge pile of plastic bottles methodically peeling away the labels. And the reason for that is that when these things do go into a plastic facility where they have to be melted down and reconstituted into new packaging, you don't want anything extraneous

on them. So if you do have someone they're peeling the labels off, you can get more for each kilogram of plastic. A lot of it, First of all, do not get recycled in any way. The vast majority of plastic waste in the world is not recycled. It's just dumped or burned. And why is that. There are a

number of reasons for it. One is infrastructure. You know, in many developing countries in particular, they're not enough recycling infrastructure to handle the volumes of plastic that The plastic industry, which if you like, comprises consumer companies you know, Coke, Pepsi, as well as the petrochemical companies that actually produce the raw materials for plastic, big oil, you know, Exxon Shell, BP, they've pumped more plastic into the world than there are

recycling plants to handle, so a huge amount never recycled. Now, you said that a lot of the countries where this plastic ends up don't have enough recycling capability to actually handle all of it. Why is it then that they keep taking more and more of it if they don't have a way to actually recycl it into something else. To understand how all of this plastic waste ended up in the places where it is now, which are largely in South East Asia, you have to go back a

few years. So for the last oh thirty years or so, China was the major destination for exports of waste, plastic and all other kinds of waste. There was a huge recycling industry in China. A lot of companies had sprung up to deal with imported plastic from places like the US. A lot of people got very rich doing this. But in sen the Chinese government decided that it didn't want to have this industry anymore, that it was causing too many problems, too much pollution. Uh, and they shut it

down pretty much overnight. Uh. You know, And when China decides to do something, they can do it in a in a very comprehensive and effective way. So exports to China essentially disappeared over the course of a few months. But all that plastic, all that waste, still had to go somewhere. It's like a balloon. If you press it

down in one place, it'll pop up somewhere else. And the somewhere turned out to be Southeast Asia, especially actually Malaysia, very close to where I'm sitting now, where there was a huge surge of plastic coming into kind of fly by night recycling factories that it all popped up very very quickly, often unlicensed, unregulated, totally illegal, and also Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries around the region because you needed

to send this stuff to places with minimal environmental standards, cheap labor, and in many cases officials who were easy to pay off, so that if you did get in trouble, you could still keep bringing in these loads of waste. You met a man uh I believe in Bangkok who had a recycling plant move in right next door. Can you describe sort of what happened to his life after

that happened. This was a really remarkable experience. I met a man in the in the Bangkok suburbs named Venue jerramancom and Venue has a house on a quiet street and in what was a storage yard next to his house was suddenly turned into a small scale plastic recycling plant. And the and so the factor is right here, where would the fumes come from? From this side? Pomp from this hole and this while oh I see okay, yeah yeah, oh,

and they have an extractor fan. Environmental groups have found a really terrible environmental effects around plastic recycling facilities all over the world. So in n use case, he suddenly noticed these very intense, acrid fumes floating into his house and particularly alarming, he started finding dead birds on his lawn. When you would find dead pigeons, was it around here? It's just it's all over the front of the house. So if this is killing pigeons, it's pretty bad. Yes,

it's going to kill my family too. So I have to let it go, all right and leave this house. Yes, to leave the house. He and his wife began to get sick. They got headaches, nausea. He developed a red, itchy patch of skin just below his nostrils, and it was very clear to him that what had happened was a result of this plastic plant operating. How I should say that the company that runs the plastic plants as always denied this. They say they comply with environmental regulations

and and that they responded to the news complaints. But what he did tell me at his home, which is now sold, was exactly in line with what environmental experts would expect to see from a poorly ventilated plastic waste recycling facility. Even since this morning this morning, still have a strong semeal strong smell this morning. Yes, inside the house when you woke up. No, no, no, I I can alsop here right, Oh, I see, I come here and I play it over in the house and inside

the house has a strong smell of the chemistry. Wow, okay, So I need to I need to use the inside fan open and roid out to mega ventilation. So what is Thailand's government doing about this? As you can imagine, being a dumping ground for waste from other countries richer countries is not popular. It's very rarely popular, and in a number of countries in this region in Southeast Asia, there have been political efforts to restrict plastic imports. So

Thailand is no exception. It is in the process of bringing in a phased ban on plastic waste imports that will, based on the current model they're looking at, take effect from. It will be fairly strict there there won't be a lot of em exceptions to it. There don't appear to be many loopholes, which is quite different from what we've

seen in some other Southeast Asian countries. But I think it's it's important to remember it's very hard to enforce this, and it's very hard to enforce it in countries that don't have the kind of capabilities that the US or European governments do. There's a lot of illegal waste shipment, there's a lot of corruption and bribery throughout this region. And even if a country like Thailand does succeed in curbing plastic imports, you may see another example of the

balloon phenomenon I mentioned earlier. All of this ust has to go somewhere. It cannot be recycled in the countries where it is generated because there isn't enough capacity, so it may go next to me and mar or Lous or or places in Africa that have even less capacity to deal with it. In a country like Thailand. Matt thanks so much for taking the time. Of course, very happy to it, and you can find more reporting from Bloomberg's journalists kitchellel and Matthew Campbell on Bloomberg dot com.

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