Dirty Business: what really happens to your recycling

[Music] which is absolutely astonishing I never thought we would see this it's sitting here doing nothing - spinning here hormones already month people have put this in their recycling bins they thought it was gonna be recycled and yet it's just stuck in this logjam what they actually gave you from the UK was a mix of who knows what I'm not supposed to getting this no one wants it there was high hopes for this it's gonna be recycled it was gonna have a new life now because it's been shipped like this it's just landfill father [Music] [Music] we've never consumed so much and a lot of it is plastic we produce 20 times more plastic today than we did 50 years ago I want to find out what happens to it all where does it go and how much of it actually gets recycled what I discovered was a system that pushes the problem off our shores the end result plastic piling up and it isn't going away it all starts here at home like a lot of families we produce our fair share of waste I think we're a bit different when it comes to recycling I think I'm a good recycler but what do you think two-thirds of us admit to being confused about what can and can't be recycled plastic bottles and tins bottles that's recyclable plastic presumably that's what's wrong with that people talk about washing it but I'm just not sure whether you need to do that I just get it finish with it as soon as they're finished with it I just bring it in the bin done this isn't recyclable film but it's plastic so this shouldn't be in that bin did you put it in I do fight I genuinely do find the whole thing very confusing and I'm not convinced that it's actually worth doing so why is it up to me I want to know more so I'm hitching a ride with the guys who collect my own recycling bins there are 450 councils with varying collection schemes and differing rules about what can and can't be recycled if you don't get it right it won't be collected [Music] [Music] you want to see [Music] [Music] [Music] tell me now because [Music] so you're washing your big pots out and you sort your glass baking sins wash out if not smelling all the time the bins are the day's collection ends here my local depo it's then picked up and hauled off to a sorting plant and there's a lot of it in just one year British households throw 22 million tons of waste into the bin EU targets demand that we recycle half of that by 2020 but rates are stagnating it just 44% [Music] I started in this job in January it opened my eyes to recycling we're not going to places like these you see em which can actually go into a lorry it's very very distressing 20 today you think 20 20 day or two but if you thought all of that plastic ended up being recycled then you're in for a big shock all this plastic might get collected but it doesn't mean it'll get another life we know that we used to recycle very little indeed we know that if you take some products you are recycling probably 40 or 50 percent of what what goes into the marketplace but we know on other things that we're actually recycling practically nothing on a global scale the numbers are staggering 78 million tons of plastic packaging get produced every year and then after very often a very short use just 14% of the plastic packaging gets collected for recycling and even less of that just 2% gets recycled at high quality into new packaging then another 14% gets burnt after use another 40% gets landfills and I quite staggering one thirds of all plastic packaging ends up polluting the environment I found it astonishing that around the world only 2% of our plastic packaging gets recycled I wanted to see what happened with my plastic when I was in my kitchen the other day my children even their yogurt pots as we do a lot from time to time those yogurt pots end up in here right absolutely absolutely those yogurt pots end up here along with about 60 thousand tons of other people chocolate pots to it of course we're here by the time my Recycling's landed here it's traveled nearly 200 miles and gone through countless hands it's an industry that employs nearly 20,000 were we take in material from people's bins and we turn it back into resources by the time the waste that's behind you leaves here it's actually quite a valuable commodity explain what the market is like for plastic in the moment the market for plastic is it's fairly volatile but it's fairly strong it's all resources all of this is resources and I don't want to wait a bit we want to turn those into the maximum value for the market we possibly can it turns out that a lot of our plastic doesn't get processed here it's exported overseas and one country has taken more of it than any other China we live in a commercial world it's no different to any other material it will go wherever the market demand is it will go to the highest bidder China has been an important market for the export of plastics from the UK China imports 10 million tons of classic they don't do it just to get plastic at home they do it because they needed to feed the manufacturing process it's a value commodity it's a resource that gets used to produce products it's not a way of disposing a material but as China's appetite for plastic scrap increased the big problem started to develop whole villages grew dedicated to sorting through the world's filthy plastic one man documented what he found I'd like you to carve India Oh trouble I get a gimbal triple IG inevitable like a little bit come in window okay can I try namah namah namah balaji me with you Carol are you sure don't go so don't know you can fit onto my a juicer don't poet gentlemen will you go together like it fit under the adduction come on Elijah to shower me return it to them the largest tuna her handsome up a true leader sure who you will fire you di di don't go high eating for that teacher doing with your shine it was a wake-up call for China who saw this as a big problem they had to deal with their reaction would send shockwaves around the world I'm trying to find out what happens to all our recycling it's a journey that's taken me thousands of miles to the other side of the world Hong Kong is the world's gateway to China it's through this artery that much of the world's plastic scrap passes on its way to be processed on the mainland in July 2017 China rocked the recycling world by announcing it would impose tough restrictions on the import of foreign waste they called it national sword we've become more more conscious of waste we've seen a lot more publicity more and more people know that they want to recycle they get very frustrated when they can but they don't know where it goes this assumption that it will be being reprocessed and made into good things in the UK but frequently it's not because easier and cheaper to put into a container and send it through on to China why not government equally is it's moving the problem away it's still achieving our recycling targets they've been said but it's maybe it's somebody else's expense just trying to sum up to me what our policy of the UK has been regarding China she needs a solution let's put in a container in felixstowe and wave bye-bye but China is saying I'm having for a little while why are we receiving your mixed rubbish so they became normal straight under a program called national sword china's message was brutally clear any dirty contaminated plastic would be flatly rejected the kind of plastic Britain's been sending China for decades we export about 60% of the packaging plastic waste that we collect and of that two-thirds that we export about a third 40% of that goes to China operational national sword had big impact in that it's always half the amount of plastic in China that's the problem that we've now got China who are now saying actually we don't want this low quality stuff anymore so we're going to close our doors and you're going to have to find somewhere else finding somewhere else for the plastic is proving very difficult I've come to meet Tony Wong he's been trading plastic for 20 years and he has a lot of it sitting in this yard in Hong Kong because China won't take it so this is full of varying amounts of plastic it is it's about a value of that over $10,000 but now because stuck in here and that the market changed because of the importing maybe $7,000 20% down so stuff that's been washed in clean and this is good stuff for you nothing wrong with this nothing at all look at this even though spout and I can see you're very passionate about this this is I see the money I see I see the business to me not like sonic oh well it's a cold in here it's very standard kind of items buzz you just need a country that's willing to take it of course yes and that's the problem yes to put home for them to turn back into value this is now the world's bottleneck for plastic scrap tons of it stuck in limbo the big question now where's it all going to go meet the man who's made his fortune in recycling Steve Wong works with Tony to import tens of thousands of tons of plastic through Hong Kong to be processed in China these plastic film bags have come over on the container from the United Kingdom to here to your place [Music] but China's ban means Steve has to ship his plastics somewhere else he's looking to neighboring countries in which to process China's unwanted plastic he's heading to Thailand and I'm going with him [Music] over several days I followed Steve from site to site he's running out of time to find a place which is capable of dealing with the plastic he wants to recycle [Music] where is what is that myself experience to feel about it the big question here is whether Thailand can cope with what China is rejecting [Music] what we saw it one processing plant put all that in doubt here we found recycling from the UK sitting we were told for more than a year then more disturbing biohazard bags being melted down to be turned into anything from children's toys to household appliances and tastes like more decent than this place please quite messy I see water everywhere and although their production right now is see not a broken machine [Music] what struck me was the bags and bags of well non recyclable waste that was some of it was clearly from the UK that was just gonna sit there for however long is that a sign of what can get through the system what can slip through the net I think this is why China stopping pottage on the plastic wrap because exporters they thought they did anything the ban on importing recycled plastics into China can be a great opportunity for the UK it forces the UK to rethink how they deal with their plastics post use it can also go the bad way where we would continue exporting the plastics for abroad where the infrastructure is even worse than in China and where we have to believe it gets recycled because we have collected and sorted and send it there but actually what happens there is it perhaps gets burnt or it gets treated in a way that's negative for the local environment I wanted to know how Britain would cope if we had to deal with our own plastic instead of sending it abroad what's gonna happen when China closes the door it wasn't gonna be good news I've spent months investigating what happens to our recycling of all a plastic we've been sending abroad all these years a staggering 60 percent of exports have been going to one place China problem is they don't want it anymore I've come to one of the biggest plastic processors in Britain to find out why we've been sending so much material abroad and where all this plastic is gonna go now Petey is in the region of 200 pounds a ton that's carbonated drinks and water bottles milk bottles detergent bottles they're about 300 pounds of top why are you exporting it why can't we just deal with it here in the UK restrictions in the UK's capacity historically that hasn't been a growth that matches the recovery of the materials from the waste management authorities and local authorities the capacity doesn't meet the demand we're not a big island we've got small amount of land mass where do we put this material I think it's a failing in the system it's easier to put it in a container and export it rather than spend significant amounts of money putting a processing plant it's well-known that there is a poor auditing system for materials that go overseas to China or Asia particularly it's generally out of sight out of mind I'd rather not know what's happening to it as long as it's not on our back door truth of the matter is is that we will have no idea at all whether this gets a new life actually properly recycled no we don't we don't know whether it's burn buried or just left on the side of the street so we don't have enough processes to deal with all our plastic but there's another reason we've been pushing our waste abroad all these years the packaging recovery note or PRM is a government subsidy designed to encourage recycling let's take a turn of plastic scrap a UK recycler processes that plastic and because of contaminants like labels glues or liquids might only get half a ton of recycled plastic from it they would earn half a subsidy or half a PRN however an exporter can take that ton of plastic scrap contaminates and all and ship it off to be recycled abroad that turn of scrap is counted as fully recycled and the full PRN subsidy is earned but no checks are made as to how much recycled plastic is actually produced and so it encourages export PRN system was designed to subsidize the recycler to help him confidence to invest in more equipment that will recycle more material that will then grow the infrastructure in the UK but unfortunately the system was designed but it was weighted towards the exporter for that whole bale would be eligible for a PRN whereas those as a recycler we're only eligible for what we separate and reprocess the wait for the exporter is much more attractive than that of the recycler so once it goes in this container the whole container gets issued with that evidence no direct whereas if you have to deal with it in the UK it might only be like 40 50 percent if you're looking correct so the incentive is to bug it in a container and send it away still get the credit for it in fact for all of it rather than deal with it here in the UK correct correct we're not getting the full value of that subsidy whereas the exporter is getting the full value by weight it seemed to me that the ban imposed by China could actually be an opportunity for British business Javed Mao ji set up his own plastic processing business in 2014 he tried to do the right thing by recycling here in the UK how would you describe how britain's recycling industry what state do you think it is in it's absolutely terrible I mean the it's a it's a mishmash it doesn't work properly and it's the whole structure of the British recycling sector at the moment seems to be focused on export the wastes don't process it here because there's no incentive to process anything here there's an incentive export when it launched Jabez company Ecotec was doing well but success was short-lived he just couldn't compete with the exporters how does it feel coming back to it that's pretty unpleasant Ashley but I mean I haven't been back here since the company went into administration there's a very very painful process not only financially but also in terms of lost jobs and also in terms of lost capacity for the UK's recycling business so we we as a UK company we would get a PRN on what actually came out the other end so whereas if you were exporting you would get a PRN on the entire value so if you export plastic bottles on the records you've recycled all of them that's correct but not necessarily all of them were recycled that's exactly but it had absolutely no bearing on the figure that was jotted down on the book well I think I think that the reality is is the UK was liking rates are exaggerated by the PRN system so you in a way would say that you you were a victim of that system absolutely yeah and so what is the incentive from the government to get rid of a system which is favorable to our recycling rates well it's it's it's it looks like we were cycling far more than we are [Music] it's a problem what that system does not only does it mean we're over reporting recycle rates we're actually undermining the competitiveness of our own domestic plastic reprocesses we're actually exporting value we could be reprocessing that material here we had better quality material if we were making sure that we were accounting for the reciting properly we would not have this competitive disadvantage for our domestically processes these are being those overseas it is a serious flaw that we don't know well enough what happens to quite a bit of the recycling we export a lot of plastic to be recycled I myself think that we should have a system where we are much more likely to use that at home because you know where it's gone if you export it and it's increasingly difficult to do that the Chinese are increasingly not accepting it you don't always know where it's gone this is where it's gone I was about to discover what happens when the recycling system fails there are thousands of tons of plastic scrap lying in this yard shipped from the UK in containers tons and tons of plastic sitting in a yard on the outskirts of Hong Kong doing nothing to it spinning here for months already I haven't go to the site to look at the material you sent me the photos which of course not like this what were you expecting we're expanding on a bottle and what did you actually get in the end film Richard plastics and even some pavement here no one willing to handle it ok the one winning because labor intensive no one wants it no one wants it it's just landfill fodder it was an extraordinary sight this recycling had been collected and then shipped just like the system encouraged now it had been left to rot how do you feel about the person who shipped this to you then we found bags from Chelmsford Council in Essex and I realized that this plastic had travelled nearly six thousand miles hundreds of tons of plastic recycling from British homes sits in Hong Kong destined for landfill it's a shocking sight and disheartening to think that people have taken the time to sort it thinking they were doing the right thing amongst it all we found household recycling bags from Chelmsford Council in Essex so I went to Chelmsford Council to see what they know about where their recycling goes and what's ultimately done with it a lot of priorities do these are collection system bags we allow about 3.5 per week through the residents which we deliver free of charge once a year we put a lot of trust in the people that take away obviously our material I went to Hong Kong two weeks ago I find a yard like this this arrow is a pack of recycling from the UK unfortunately that comes from Chelmsford Council it was not to the quality that the the receiving end wanted and so it was rejected and the unfortunate fact is that you can never tell where your materials going I think that will be absolutely investigated there's no way we can be happy about that no no from what you've just highlighted something has gone wrong down the road which obviously raises a huge question for us doesn't it really one will be investigated and once we find out the detail behind it we would take steps to take whatever steps are needed to resolve it we don't want the idea that our material is ending up in a landfill site on foreign lands or or in a yard somewhere we want to make sure that material is being recycled as we've explained to our residents then I received a package sent anonymously photographs of plastic packaging from the UK destined for recycling but now it appeared left sitting on a site in Poland it looked like another case in which the system had gone badly wrong I wanted to know more so I headed to Poland and took along an expert on plastic packaging to take a look approaching the East End district of twenty years of being involved in packaged in weeks the last fifteen so bills or plastic it's quite common so this yard is owned by a British plastics exporter the same exporter whose plastic we found in Hong Kong it's a mix of bottles tubs food trays and film all piled up in bales oh this is carrier bags wow these are beyond you say Clank Wow the first thing is its degraded to such a level it's not really viable for recycling it's not really suitable for the safe in it anything that's held stored on a safe for over 12 months has deemed to be aimed disposal and therefore a landfill and that that could be that can be deemed as a train and there could be prosecution types and taken against to me it looks like it's inevitable destinations a landfill so it looks like curbside recycling certainly this carrier bags there that from a local council that's sure that householders going to the effort of putting all their plastic waste into a bag this is Chelmsford Council it's not the first time I've seen a Chelmsford council bag in a place where you wouldn't expect these are mixed waste feels what it means as it's cardboard metals plastic all mixed together and the if they've come from the UK and certainly with some of the containers on here it looks like they're from the UK they shouldn't be exported what is the chance that this was brought here to be recycled because of the high amount of cardboard in it and it's being stored outside there's no chance of this being recycled plastic scrap shipped from the UK can earn a packaging recovery note or PRN that's the evidence note to say something's being recycled but no one checks to see if it's actually being recycled and incredibly it counts as recycled towards our EU target the exporter gets paid no matter what I mean you could say that the whole package recovery note system for exporters is like just like money for nothing license to print money you could say that but the intention of the system was that the money from prm's would go back into increasing infrastructure but it looks like in some cases it's being abused I think the systems got that inherent risk in it when things are transported across countries across boundaries it's very difficult to keep track of them the amount off and I'll call it pure waste that is lying on the ground the films that have degree deeds the carrier bags that are freaking into nothing and it's highly unlikely those were going to be recycled so effectively they've been brought here to cool and told to get disposed off we found more evidence of plastic from Britain ending up overseas and some of it was so badly decayed that landfill was the only option we contacted Chelmsford Council again to tell them we'd seen more of their recycling in Poland after looking into it Chelmsford confirmed that the plastic we'd found in Hong Kong and Poland had gone through companies accredited as re processors and exporters of packaging waste from the Environment Agency they said they remain confident their approach has the least environmental impact of all recycling practices the reason why Britain has been sending so much plastic overseas is that the PRN system actively encouraged it among those who are critical of the scheme is the man who came up with the idea in the first place former Environment Minister John Gummer now Lord eben there are several problems with it first of all I don't think we have sufficient control over where it goes secondly I don't think we have sufficient control over the quality of what is in there in other words you can have mixed up in that material things that are not going to be recycled and the third thing is China is now from the 1st of January not to accept it I think we ought to be recycling it here and in the rest of Europe but the problem is as you well know is the the problem with the PRN or the PRN system is it incentivizes export it does in certain circumstances you are incentivized to export it that's nonsense and shouldn't happen and we should change it in 2015 Defra commissioned a series of independent briefing notes looking at the PRN scheme we've obtained them they raised concerns about the system the briefing notes warmed that competition is insufficient and there's a lack of transparency and that local counsel so little if any benefit from the money raised the system was seen to favor export with low quality waste providing a cheap disposal route for contaminants and worryingly the papers repeated concerns that the PRN scheme doesn't work to encourage investment in the UK reprocessing industry but these briefing notes were never made public and no changes were made to the PRN system in tune Michael Gove was appointed Environment Secretary and walked straight into a crisis a month later China said they'd ban imports at the start of 2018 a committee of MPs wanted to know what the new environment secretary was going to do about it what impact do you think this will have on the UK waste economy will have it's a very good question and something to which I'll be completely honest I want to firstly just go back to November 2 that environmental audit committee where they were talking about the impact of the ban that China is intending to impose on plastic imports and you'll remember you said that you hadn't given it much thought given that British business British processors believed that this is huge do you regret that yes it's a significant issue I haven't given it enough thought but what we're doing now is everything we can in order to ensure that we turn what is a challenge into an opportunity we've been exporting too much waste what we need to do is to make sure that we reduce the amount that we produce and also process more of it at home do you think that we have the capacity now to deal with the plastic that would have otherwise gone to China naturally the fact that China's going to close its doors to a significant amount of that plastic that's an additional challenge on us here in the UK I want to talk about capacity because I want to spend the next minute of this interview just showing you some footage that we filmed in Poland and in hong kong it shows tens of thousands of tons of plastic on yards that has been abandoned what's your view about what you've just seen well it reinforces the case for the reforms that I've already explained that we plan to implement that the PRN scheme at the moment while it has significantly improved recycling rates and recycling rates have grown over the course of the last 20 years it's still not good enough then the government revealed its long awaited 25 year plan for the environment in that plan the government provided no details of any proposed changes to the PRN scheme we're probably deluding ourselves we think we have a system that's better than it is and actually if it isn't a very good system well we should improve it but it must be recognizing that helping the environment does come at a cost the cheap way is let's dump it somewhere else I don't think we're planning quick enough and I think it means investment I think it means government support and I think we need facilities such as these to accept that volume of material we have to look at reprocessing it domestically it's our waste our problem we should be recycling it when I first started this journey I had no idea where our recycling ended up but I found it scattered thousands of miles across the globe abandoned in yards from Eastern Europe to Asia out of sight out of mind what I learned was that until we as a nation take responsibility for what we put in our bins create a system we can trust this problems going to pile up and we can't afford to ignore it [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sky News

Views: 1,472,053

Rating: 4.8216248 out of 5

Keywords: Sky News, skynews, news, Plastic, Plastic Waste, Plastic pollution, environment, environmentalism, Climate change, Hong Kong, China, Recycling, Pollution, Climate, Asia, Malaysia, Corruption, UK, United Kingdom, Michael Gove

Id: oRQLilXLAIU

Length: 45min 59sec (2759 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/crazycatlady331]

There's a 3rd category. People who pick up litter. I go for a walk in a local (small) park every day the weather permits (aka no precipitation). I pick up at least a dozen single-use water bottles every day on my walks. I put them in the (park) recycling bin so I don't have to carry them home.

Since I started walking for exercise, I pick up no fewer than 5 of these things a day. Drives me crazy. I have not bought bottled water since 2016 (it was a hot day and I was dehydrated).

[u/HerdingCatsAllDay]

Well that was depressing and infuriating.

[u/muracc92]

I argue about the process used in recycling a lot. All one has to do is research whats involved in the recycling process to know its hardly helping. Recycling was the original "greenwash".