Does recycling help fight climate change?

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Kate Lamble and me. Neil Rosel. Today we are talking about recycling rubbish. Yeah. Because polls show. Wow, they'll find it. Hang on, I never said that.

Our question this week, does recycling help fight climate change? Let's start with what might be a bit of nostalgia for unique. Use Worth it. It is worth it. Thank you for that. That's an old Canadian public service ad. The three R slogan, reduce, reuse, recycle, goes back decades, long before people really started putting the pieces together about how human activity was driving climate change. Today, recycling is a habit for millions.

And a recent global report from the independent pollsters Ipsos suggests most people believe recycling is the number one thing people in developed countries can do to reduce emissions. We're gonna look at why people think this, but first, what are we even talking about when we talk about recycling?

To begin, let's go to Malaysia in Southeast Asia, where reporter Chen Yu Wen has been looking into this for us. So we are here at Tanjung Harapan, which means in Port Klein and I'm just standing here at this public seafront and to my right you see the north port where there are shipping containers stacked up. And to the left is the Westport. Westport is a bigger shipping container storage. Why is that place so important for our story about recycling?

Well, you know, Port Klang is a major shipping port in Malaysia and we have if not tens of thousands, we're talking about maybe hundreds of thousands, containers coming in through this port into the country. And some of those containers carry waste. Malaysia has become one of the key destinations for waste from around the world. So when word spread that Malaysia is fast becoming a gold mine from this mountain of uh foreign trash Then more recyclers started to jump in.

How do they make money off this rubbish? What are they paid to do? Well from speaking to people on the ground, one facility would purchase and shred the plastics into tiny sharks and then you'll be transported to another facility to be melted down into recycled pallets. and then exported to manufacturing industry which wants cheap raw material.

Making the unwanted wanted, turning the old into new. This is recycling. The word itself suggests a loop, a cycle, going round and round. You can perhaps see why people would intuitively think this helps the planet and keeps emissions down. But think of how most of the economy works. It's not a cycle at all. Ker Wang from the World Resources Institute says it's more linear, like a straight line. That means we dig up the minerals, fossil resources, we make them into products.

And then when we no longer need those products, we dunk them or we burn them, right? That's a linear. It goes from one end to the other end. It doesn't come back. And that is problematic. In a lot of ways. There's local pollution, there's the effect on wildlife, and so on, but we're focusing on climate change.

All the energy used to create, consume and then dispose of this stuff creates emissions. Lots of them. It generates about half of global greenhouse gas emissions and it causes about 90% of biodiversity loss. So anything that bends what she calls the linear economy into a loop surely helps reduce that, right?

Totally logical. You can see why all those people in that poll thought the recycling would be the most effective action to fight global warming. But it's not really necessarily the single most effective action, I have to say. And This might contradict the fact that I'm a recycling expert, but we have to put things in in perspective.

Our recycling expert is Kostas Velas, an engineer and lecturer at the University of Leeds in England. Let us dispel a myth. There are no real perpetual materials. There are always loss of quality. And there are always losses as part of the process. We always need to put additional resources in the process. That loss of quality means your kid's high quality plastic toy might become a basic plastic flower pot.

The pot may then be recycled into plastic fibers that could go into making a bag. The quality is lower, but there's still some use there. Eventually, however, there's nothing left to do with the plastic but throw it away. It's exhausting. That's the quality question. Then there's the fact that all these stages require energy. We've been talking about Malaysia. Recycling facilities there are overwhelmingly reliant on oil, gas, and coal.

So the energy used to recycle creates emissions that drive climate change. Don't get us wrong though, recycling isn't entirely rubbish when it comes to reducing emissions. There are potential savings when we try to recycle instead of manufacturing the products from the very first place. But this is not as universal as we would have liked or would have thought. Right. So there are some products for which a new version is actually better for the climate.

Take paper. Recent peer-reviewed research published in Nature Sustainability found that newly produced sheets have a lower carbon footprint than recycled paper. Greenhouse gas emissions go up when we recycle paper. In the effort to recycle, we can end up with this paradoxical, seemingly paradoxical And it comes down to energy. I'm talking to you from the west coast of Canada where there's historically a big pulp and paper.

industry and a lot of our most of our power here comes from hydroelectric dams which have a lower greenhouse gas impact than using a coal-fired power plant or whatnot. But because paper is recycled in places where they do burn fossil fuels, that that is one reason that can account for this kind of surprising result. Yeah, this could be a core consideration if we are to think about the climate implications

Of the whole recycling, paper, or any other materials, these should be a core consideration of our approach. The same logic applies to aluminium cans. Here, recycling is a definite win. Making new aluminium is incredibly energy intensive. Costa says making a recycled aluminium can produces up to 95% fewer emissions. And then there are the plastics, which are made from fossil fuels.

With the plastics, in most of the cases, when we try to compare like for like, we cannot just compare one kilogram, for example, of virgin plastic with one kilogram of recycled plastic. We have to take into account also the effort we have taken to produce the secondary plant. Hmm. So a recycled aluminum can is likely to have a lower carbon footprint versus new than a recycled plastic bottle versus new. Exactly.

It's worth lingering on plastics because they get so much press. And because plastics are everywhere. Their amazing variety presents a real problem when it comes to recycling. Not all plastic can be technically recycled as we speak. So you might put there a plastic film thinking you're doing the right thing.

But this material might not be targeted for recycling by your local authority, or might not be technically recyclable at all, or might be not financially viable to recycle this material, which is for the vast majority of plastic. So you might have materials there that they look potentially recyclable, but in fact they're not.

How much plastic is recycled? The numbers are not really, really great. So from all the plastics waste that is generated around the world, we know that roughly only fifteen percent Is collected for recycling. And from that, only half is actually recycled. So out of 100 kilogram of plastic waste generated, only eight of them will eventually be recycled.

Whoa, that's tiny! And you wouldn't believe how much time I spend washing and sorting all out. Same, and I hate doing it. But it's important to say that if you and I didn't spend time sorting and cleaning our recycling, things would be even worse, so please. Keep the faith, Kate.

A few years ago, China was the number one destination for the world's rubbish. Then they really cracked down on the practice because so much of what they were being sent just couldn't be recycled. Malaysia has followed suit. It's now begun to limit what it will accept. But where there's money to be made, there are people willing to break the rules to get it. Our reporter WEN in Malaysia has been tracking down sites being used to illegally store waste.

She was told about one where there were bales of plastic. But when she arrived, There had been a big fire because the building was in ruins and the road in front of the building it was scorched black and we tried to look for some of the plastic waste that were there but a lot of them were melted.

you know in clums of just black goo. Fires are common in the illegal waste business. It's a tool of the trade in fact. If you haven't got the means to store or actually recycle the waste, you resort to less environmentally friendly techniques. So they get stuff that they can't recycle and they just think, Well what are we gonna do with it? Let's burn it.

Yeah. And that's the easiest and fastest way to dispose of this plastic waste. When recorded her visit to that site of Black Goo, she visited with Farhan NASA from a group called Break Free from Plastic. So maybe Forhan you can tell us a little bit about this place. So it's pretty clear that there was imported ways. But now after our visit last two weeks had been burned. So it's a bit unrecognizable. This uh choco facial for Japanese. Japanese.

Well there is more here. Also Japanese wordings. This looks like cosmetic products. We do smell something kind of like a metallic chemical smell in the air around here. Kind of like gunpowder. We see waist, they are rubber tyres, burnt plastic. This is crumpled plastic from Europe. It's like a food packaging I think. There's some heating instructions for Sainsbury's. Sainsbury's. Ah, it's a cheese and onion roll from Sainsbury.

So Saints Brees is a supermarket here in the UK. Yeah. You don't have it in Malaysia, right? No, we don't have that in Malaysia. So I could walk down the road from here and I could have bought that for lunch, but it's ended up where you are in Malaysia. Malaysia. Yes. And I suppose someone who threw that away in the UK might think that they're doing a good thing, think that it's gonna be recycled, it's gonna save the planet. But in fact it's been burnt on a roadside in Malaysia. Yes.

I think it need a moment, frankly. Again, we're not saying recycling's a bad idea. It's just rarely done well. Shipping waste to the other side of the world uses emissions that recycling is meant to save. Yeah, and burning plastic that can't be recycled. That potentially has health consequences for the people who live nearby. People who didn't buy the sandwiches or the cosmetics in the first place.

There's another consequence of recycling that may surprise even those who follow this issue closely. Jenny van Dorn is a professor in services marketing at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. I know that for many people marketing is the root of all evil, right? That uh we convince people to buy stuff that they don't need.

But I figured already more than a decade ago that if marketing is so powerful then maybe we can also use what we know for marketing to make people make better decisions. Better decisions, specifically around recycling. A few years ago, Yenny noticed companies were beginning to boast about their recycling cred. For instance, you have jackets that have been made from old bottles. Even my mom was at a certain point carrying something around that said I used to be a bottle.

I've seen that products advertised as being made from other things, benches with signs like I'm made of recycled plastic. Yeah, I even saw McDonald's talking about it on TV the other night. Of McCaffrey. Smile now they've become playground. Jenny wondered what effect these messages were having on people's behavior. So she did an experiment. She offered a load of students plates of cookies to eat during a movie.

So uh we had many students wanting to participate. We gave them a lot, right? Even more than the average student can eat. The students had a choice about what to do with their leftovers. They could put them out for other students to enjoy, or throw them away.

So for some participants it was a black bin for general waste For some participants a green bin for biodegradable waste, and for some they have the green bin and there we said the biodegradable waste will be turned into biofuel to power the local buses in a new waste recycling project. And there we saw that people were nearly twice as likely to discard the food when they were told that it would be used to uh power the local bus as biofuel. Why and yeah, that was rather uh

shocking to be honest. We expected some effect, but not that much. So for some, feeding a boss was more enticing than feeding people. Yes, so they repeated the experiment, this time asking participants about their decision. And there we found that people who had the opportunity to throw their trash into the fancy new biorefuel recycling scheme, they felt better about themselves.

Than those who had imagined saving the food for others to actually eat. So it really made them feel good about themselves. This is powerful stuff. Most of us just want to feel good at the end of the day, and if we get the opportunity, we're gonna take it. It seems some people get more of a warm, fuzzy glow from putting things in the recycling than reusing things.

Which is basically what sharing the cookies with people would have been. Yeah. Yenny's team even tried the experiment with people choosing between glass drinking cups that could be washed and used again, and single-use plastic cups, which they told people could be recycled into clothing.

Thought that their plastic bottle would be recycled, they would be more likely to choose the plastic bottle over the glass. Which is amazing, right? This suggests that well-advertised recycling schemes could actually encourage people. Oops. Far from reducing emissions and helping to fight climate change, that's To increase them. Maybe this also explains why of the three R's we heard about earlier Views. Recycle. We seem to have forgotten about the first two. Reduce. Reuse.

They don't make us feel as good and no one gets rich. Our economy model today indeed is based on making more stuff, consuming more stuff. and we don't really have a successful alternative in mind. So it is indeed very, very tricky.

Ker Wang from the World Resources Institute is having a go at making a difference anyway. She's trying to develop an idea called the circular economy. But circular economy is also more than recycling. It's about keeping products in use for longer. So keep that bottle used, not just use it for once, but use it many times.

Simple to say, hard to do. I have two boys and as any parent of young boys, you know, you you probably go through a pair of jeans every six weeks or so when they start having holes on on the knees. And I live in the Netherlands, right? So in the village I live, it is really more expensive just trying to get a patch on the knees than buying a new pair, right? So I still go to the repair shop, but why would average people do that?

once she approaches just buy something new and just throw away the old product. Nid yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw yw I once traveled to Liberia with a colleague from London who took clothes that needed Mendy because it was so much easier to find someone to do it there than in Europe.

And I remember talking to a friend of the program, Rajesh Joshi in India, and I was complaining to him about the trouble I was having fixing my headphones, and he just said, come to Delhi. There's a shop on every corner that could help you out. The economy is pretty much built on people selling more products. So how do you encourage them to sell and produce less?

So if we start thinking about products as services, then that may offer a way for companies to sort of decouple themselves from having to sell as many stuff as possible. This is a totally different way of thinking, but it's not just a wild idea. Kerr has a real-world example. Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam. A major operation. In pre-pandemic times, it saw more than 70 million passengers a year. And uh the airport requires a lot of lighting, right?

Phillips had been supplying the airport with light bulbs. Then someone had a bright idea. Why sell light bulbs when you could have a contract to supply light itself? Instead of selling this so many lamps, LEDs, they really sell light as a service and they get charged by how much light the airport gets. They look into how natural light can be used, so they will need less artificial light.

Not having to sell new bulbs all the time to make money, the company instead designed fixtures that would last almost twice as long and that would be easier to swap out when they do fail. Profit for them and better for the climate.

That's a market solution, but governments can help bend the economy into a more rounded shape too. You might even have experienced this for yourself. Countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe have banned plastic bags. Many other places have started charging shoppers to take one home. Yenny van Doren says these small tweaks in policy can make a big difference to how linear our economy is. So you change the default. when I went into a store and I bought a piece of clothing

Even when it was like a small item, you got it handed over in a plastic bag. And that default changes now. There it really is another decision that needs to be made. Like yes, I want the plastic bag and yes I want to pay for it. I don't know about you, but I have one of these reusable bags in my purse all the time.

Plastic bag bans are typically introduced because of concerns about litter, not the climate. But if we demand fewer bags, fewer factories make them, which means we need less fossil fuel to keep the factories powered. It all has an impact on emissions. It's not the kind of thing though that's easily copied to other plastic products.

governments are wary of eroding consumer choice. After all, Costa Vellis reminds us plastic packaging exists for a reason. Plastics have delivered a lot of savings in terms of carbon emissions. as a lighter packaging material in comparison to alternatives. So it it has been highlighted as a more climate friendly material in many respects. And that's why it has been replacing other materials like metals.

Keeping food fresh for longer, saving weight, it seems likely that some recycling will always be necessary. However, it is a fact that we cannot just recycle our way out of the climate crisis. Let's go back to where we started. Not that. The pole. Most people think recycling is the biggest thing they can do to help fight climate change.

In some ways, it's such good news that people have grabbed on to something which in most cases will make a difference, will involve fewer emissions. But it's possible that messaging has worked too well. It shouldn't really be a surprise that a crazy bin isn't an easy answer that will fix everything. Yeah, if we really want to fight climate change, we have bigger decisions, tougher choices to make in our everyday lives.

Buying less. Flying less. Changing the way we get to work in school. And where recycling is necessary, we need to do it right. If this has got you thinking about what you can do to help fight climate change, we're preparing a show about all the many bright ideas there are and how realistic they might be. So stay tuned.

First though, what have you seen in the climate news this week, Neil? Well I was reading this really interesting piece on the BBC News website, but rather than just tell you about it, I thought it'd be better to hear from the writer himself. Marco Silva is with us. Marco. Hello, hello. Hello. Hi, Marco. So I am the BBC's climate disinformation specialist, which I appreciate is a mouthful of a title. You get to spend loads of time on the internet sort of seeking out

The spread of disinformation about the climate. Exactly. I am constantly on the lookout on social media for bad information that is being shared about global warming, about climate change. And you've done this story about climate doomism. What is climate doomism? So climate dumism to put it simply is an attitude based on the premise that is far too late for us to do anything at all about climate change, that the game is over

that we're all doomed that the human race is headed to extinction. So really a an extreme form of pessimism. Now Some of you may be wondering why exactly does this qualify, you know, as a form of disinformation? Why is this relevant to the work that I do? Well This is bad information at heart in full swing because what scientists are telling us, they are telling us this very clear, it is not. Too late to prevent and limit some of the worst effects of climate change.

We can still do something about it. We talk about climate anxiety a lot on this programme, that people have these worries about it. And so you can kind of understand why people might feel frustrated like they can't do anything. I suppose doomism is a risk as denialism is because it delays action on climate potentially. If it it's like, oh well we're all the planet's going to hell in the handbasket, then there's less point in taking action to change things.

Exactly. That's such an important point to make, you know, because the reason why this story mattered, the reason why climate dumism matter and needs to be called out is because ultimately it leads to inaction. You know, if you think if you genuinely think that in fifty years time the human race will be gone, you'll probably wonder, well, why should I cut down on the amount of meat that I eat? You start questioning all the little things that you as an individual can do.

to, you know, limit the impact of global warming. Do you have any advice for people who may identify as climate doomers? I think the most important thing here is to remind yourself of the facts of climate change. When you start looking at the science, when you start to look at what the scientists have been telling us, even in the just the last couple of months, in the various reports,

that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued. The warnings are dire, yeah. It makes for some sort of reading that will give you uh some nightmares when you think about the future, but There is still a silver lining, there is still an element of hope. There is time to limit the impact of climate change in our lives.

Marco Silva, the voice of hope. Thanks, Marco. Thanks also to producer Dervil Starr. Series producer Alex Lewis. Editor, Richard Fenton Smith, and the man who makes the mix, Tom Brignall. Till next time. Your best performance on the biggest stage when it counts. That's every athlete's dream. And just hearing like the national anthem and everything around you, it was a very special moment. This is my dream and it came true. Like many people in this world I had never seen an Olympic medal before.

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