(gentle music) - This video is sponsored by NordVPN. I think I'm done playing
Prototype for the Xbox 360. I know, I never thought
I'd say that either, but it's been 10 years. Things have moved on, I've moved on. But that's okay though, I
mean, I'll just trade it in. It's probably not worth
what it was in 2009, but look at it, on the box. It's a classic. It's gotta be worth a few quid. Just give me a second. - [Store clerk] Hiya mate, you all right? - [Chris] Hello. I was hoping to trade this in, please. - [Store employee] No worries, cheers. It's just 10p. - [Christopher] 10p. - [Store clerk] Yeah. - [Christopher] Oh, I think- - [Store clerk] What were you hoping for? It's obviously just an old 360 game. We don't sell them for very much, so. - [Christopher] Right, okay, okay, you know what, I'll keep it. - [Store clerk] No worries. Have a good day. - Thank you so much, cheers. 10p. 10p! I'll throw it away before
I give it to them for 10p. (gentle music) But okay, slightly more seriously, I wanna talk about the games that don't end up on the second-hand market. Not everything is gonna be
a treasured collectible. Sorry, Prototype. Yeah, in a few years,
this 10p could be worth 0p, or what if I'd scratched the disc, there goes any possible resale value. So my question is: is there an
environmentally conscious way of actually getting rid of one of these? As far as the UK goes, I'd like to think that I'm in the right
place to give that a go. I live in Brighton, home
of the Green Party's very first member of parliament. Shout out to Caroline Lucas,
fighting that good fight. (Hallelujah chorus) I guess, to classify what we've got here, there are three separate things. The plastic box, the
disc, and then our paper, which I think is probably
the best place to start. If we can't recycle this, then, well, our video is in quite a
bit of trouble, isn't it? Thankfully, in the UK
at least, there is a way of determining whether or
not you can recycle paper. Introducing the scrunch test. Simply grab the paper
you wish to dispose of and give it a little squeeze, just so. If it holds its shape post-scrunch, then I've got good news for you, that paper's off to live another life as a newspaper or a toilet roll. Get that scrunched up
ball of possibilities into your nearest paper recycling
bin, and you are all set. However, if you give it a squeeze and then it begins to spring
back to its original shape, that's a no-go. In the UK at least, you can't recycle that with the rest of your paper. Sorry, mate. You're not getting in. On your way. Okay, this feels wrong. Let's give this a little scrunch. (paper crumpling) To me, it looks like that
is holding its shape, so that can be popped in
our paper recycling bin at the end of our street,
along with, hopefully, now this has some staples
to get rid of, actually. There we go, there we go. (paper crumpling) One down, two to go. So as for the disc and box itself, you can recycle these in the UK, although only at certain recycling centres and some local areas won't even have them. Thankfully, we do have
one, although it's about a 35 minute walk away from here, which makes this slightly more of a faff. Now, given the topic at hand, we probably shouldn't drive there. And I guess, I guess the
dog does need a walk, so let's do some recycling? (joyful music) (Christopher laughing) We've just come to recycle something. Do you know where the CD and DVDs bit is? - [Man] Yeah, I think go
over to the other side. - [Christopher] Over to the other side. Thank you so much. (joyful music) Console games, got it. (metal door closing) (joyful music) When you recycle a CD or a DVD, it's eventually fed into
something called a granulator, which is a machine that's
basically full of knives. (disc yelling) Yeah, just loads of them spinning around at extremely high speeds. Pop your game disc in there and they'll come out the
other end looking like this. That pile of flakes is
then sorted with any ink, paper, or waste
material being removed until you're left with
just the good stuff. The polycarbonate plastic. Now it may not look like much, but everyone will want a piece of this. Polycarbonate is durable. It's heat resistant. And it's transparent. The construction industry goes mad for it. They'll want to turn
our disc into someone's conservatory or greenhouse
or a nice bus shelter. So the disc itself is in good hands, sure. But what about the box? Is that gonna get recycled too? Because yes, they're both made of plastic, but they're different types of plastic. Have I just sent that on a slightly more complicated journey to the landfill? To find out, I tried
to arrange an interview with someone at the
local recycling centre, but instead, ended up blagging one with the Technical Director for one of the largest recycling
companies in the UK instead. - With a gaming box, I guess it's made of mainly polycarbonate. - [Christopher] Yeah, so the
DVD I think is polycarbonate. And then I believe the
plastic case is polypropylene? - So polypropylene box with
a polycarbonate interior. Polycarbonate is quite a valuable plastic. There's not a lot of it around, you know, it's not the most ubiquitous
one, but we can recycle it. And we can recycle polypropylene as well. But we do have to separate them. - [Christopher] Just like the game itself, he told me that the plastic
case will also end up being granulated and then purified before being sold back to companies who could potentially use it to make things like piping, laboratory equipment or my personal favourite,
the stickers that go onto a Rubik's cube. So how do they do that? How do they make sense of it all? Allow me to struggle to
put this high-vis vest on and show you. A few days ago, I was given a tour of one of Veolia's recycling
centres in London, which they claim to be
one of the most advanced recycling facilities in all of Europe. Here they rely on a staggering amount of overlapping conveyor
belts and automation to separate the different materials and remove any contaminants
like that one, right there. Someone slipped in some cat food with the aluminium cans, mate. That'll need fixing. There's also quite a
bit of quality control done by people as well, which seems like a super demanding job, by the way. These folks are grabbing up to 60 items per minute I was told, with this facility remaining operational all day, every day. I can't imagine that's easygoing. And once the sorting has been done, there's a lot of this and
that, some more of this, and we end up here with
a sight I can't help but compare to something
a little more biological. - [Christopher] It's all
just one big intestine. - [Anni] That could
be part of the script. - [Christopher] Yeah. It's all just one big intestine. I'm sorry, in truth I thought
this place was impressive. Presumably my copy of Prototype
ended up somewhere similar, and if everything works as it's meant to, most of it would end up being recycled. Now I say most of it because there is some inevitable waste to consider like the ink used for the
cover, instruction manual and on the front of the disc, for example. There's also the outer sleeve itself. I asked about that bit
during our interview. - Yeah, if that's polyethylene, probably that part is
not gonna get recycled, but it's about less than 5% of the weight. So generally, if something's less than 5% of the weight of the products, we would consider that it's
a recyclable thing overall. It might have some small
components that are not. But you could improve the design by sticking on the label rather than having the polypropylene film there. I guess that's just part
of the manufacturing. They make all the boxes like that and then slip a sleeve in afterwards. So, you know, thinking about the design and how it'll be dismantled
is not that common. It's becoming more common. And if you were to be in the design shop when they were making these boxes, it would maybe be a
slightly different outcome if you were thinking what
happens when I throw it away? - Now I think it's
interesting that he said that because there is at least
one major game developer that has been asking that exact question. I'm talking about Sports Interactive, the creators of the
Football Manager series, who last week released their
latest title in the series. And this is the box that
they sold their game in. According to its creators, this packaging was made using
100% recycled cardboard. While inside you'll find
a manual that's been made using 100% recycled
paper with any printing that's been done on either having used vegetable or water-based ink. So that means if I want
to recycle this box, I can throw everything
except for the disc itself in with my paper and cardboard recycling rather than finding somewhere
that can handle plastics. Sports Interactive is
committed to selling all its future games in boxes like this one, which according to its sales forecast, for this series alone,
just for Football Manager could mean 20 tonnes
less plastic being used in their production process
each and every year. But hang on. Why does that even matter? I've just recycled a game that was sold in a plastic box and
from what I've been told and from what I've seen, most of it will end up being reused. So why make the switch? Well for a start, how much of this packaging is
made using recycled materials? The simple answer is we don't know. There's nothing on any of these boxes to suggest that any of it
was made with recycled goods, in fact, which isn't usually a great sign, whereas at least with this, we do have a commitment from the manufacturer. But even aside from that, as someone that lives in the UK that has
just managed to go out in the last week and
fully, or close enough, recycle a video game, a
plastic box video game, I don't think the system is as good as we've made it sound. Unlike paper or cardboard, which you can usually recycle
outside your front door, plastic packaging requires you to travel to a local recycling site. If you have one in your area
that can actually accept it. Which means of course,
that we don't recycle much of this stuff at all. A UK government report earlier this year claimed that we as a nation are recycling 46.2% of our plastic packaging compared to 79% of packaging made
from paper or cardboard. There's a pretty big gap there
between the two materials. Although in reality, it could be significantly worse than this. A report from an independent
environmental consultancy in 2018 claimed that the UK government could be fudging its
plastic recycling numbers by up to a third. Which takes us back to this
new Football Manager box. Alongside Sports
Interactive's announcement that all future games from the studio will be sold in packaging like this, they also released the
names of their suppliers. So that other games
companies could look into doing something similar. I asked the studio's
director, Miles Jacobson, why they decided to do that. - So I think anyone who does things and isn't transparent about
it, doesn't really get what's needed here. Plus, the solution that we came up with, it took us about six
months to put together. There will be better solutions out there. We're not turning around and saying that our solution is the best. There will be better. And when there are better, we'll move to those
better solutions as well. - It's worth mentioning
by the way, that this box costs about 20p more to
manufacture per unit than a box like this one, which means that games companies are having to make a decision here between profit and their environmental impact. And Sports Interactive, they're not an independent studio, they're owned by Sega. So I asked Jacobson how
exactly that conversation went. - At most corporations, a
developer in my position, turning around and saying to corporate, we want to do eco-friendly packaging, and it's going to cost 22
cents, Euro cents, a unit more, they'd get laughed out of the room. But with Sega, I was able to
say, look, we want to do this. We are doing it. We did the investigation. I put it into our budgets. No one noticed that it was in the budgets. We want to do this. We are going to do this. And Sega's response after we told them that we were doing it was, great, we'll roll it out through all of our other studios as well in the west. And we're going to start to look at it for our releases in Japan and Korea. - So that's where we're at. You can recycle physical video games, even plastic ones, if your country has the infrastructure for it. But at the moment, in the UK at least, it doesn't seem like
many people are doing it because it's a bit of a hassle. And I know we've overlooked the, the role of the secondhand
market in this video, other than getting a bit cross at CEX for offering us 10p. 10p. But that's because this issue is
bigger than just that, really. I mean, yeah, some games are gonna hold their value for decades to come, but like, what am I going to do with Big Family Games in 2030? You know, who's gonna buy that? But hey, so many games are
going digital, aren't they? It's not like there's the same kind of environmental cost to
consider when downloading, you know 150 gig of Red
Dead Redemption 2, is there? Is there? (joyful music) Thank you so much for watching this video. We do lots of other stuff on this channel from investigating Twitch streamers to showing Peter Molyneux just how many boxes he's responsible for. Welcome to your own dining room. - Oh my God. Look at all this. How the hell did you find all these? - And if you like our work, please do consider
supporting us on Patreon. It's the reason we get to do
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