Goodwill, bad practice

For a plastic recycling workshop, I made a self-watering plant pot with a plastic bottle for my mint. As I was struggling to find a relevant second life for this bottle and I tend to let my plants die from thirst, I first thought this idea was genius (thank’s Pinterest!). The concept was to pull the water in the bottom into the earth of the plant above thanks to a piece of cloth (ideally, cotton). As I didn’t want to sacrifice one of my underwear, I chose to use anti-discoloring wipes, that have important absorbent qualities. What I didn’t consider is all the chemicals that are inside these wipes (just looking at all the scary signs on the back of the packaging made me paranoid…). So my mint has been actively drinking the water that was pulled through this toxic wipe, and I haven’t used a single leaf of this plant… I basically created a machine that generates food that is not eatable, by using recycled plastic still, but by buying a pack of toxic wipes and a grown mint. So I can admit that this recycling workshop was a bit of a disaster for me.

Coffee cups recycling

I am far from being the only one to fail at trying to create eco-responsible alternatives… Let’s take recycled plastic mugs for instance. Starting with the fact that around 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown out in the U.K. each year (2019), various recycled reusable mugs initiatives emerge. But the process of extracting the plastic lining (that makes them waterproof) from the paper single-use cups is very expensive and complicated and even the resin to fix the recycled plastic is sometimes not recycled themselves. Added to this, sanitary norms and food-contact requirements allow only a certain amount of recycled plastic to be used for these reusable cups. All this makes reusable cups not so eco-friendly in the end… Also, “it can take between 20 and 100 uses for a reusable cup to offset its higher greenhouse gas emissions compared to a disposable, due to the greater amount of energy and material required to make a durable product and the hot water needed to wash them.” says this article by the Independent. Regarding the complicated extracting and recycling process, this brand decided to use the whole of the single-use cups instead: “After cleaning the cups [6 of them], they’re shredded into tiny pieces and blended with recycled polypropylene to create a new resin” (Fast Company, 2019). I bought this mug in a second-hand shop (although I recently saw it at Caffè Nero as well) and was very happy about it, as it is still totally leakproof, insulated, dishwasher safe, made in the UK and is meant to last 10 years.

Coffee cups collecting

But still, isn’t recycling leading to a vicious circle, where we need old to create new, which justifies the perpetuation of waste? Or is the main issue about the correct collection of this waste, which will lead (I hope) to lower prices when it comes to recycled objects (that are still expensive for what they are, waste)? DS Smith, the main company creating single-use cups (as well as Amazon packagings) in the UK, tried to address this issue of collecting cups in collaboration with Costa, to design and install cheap collecting bins not only in coffee shops but also in workplaces and others (where people go after buying take-aways). But the problem of bins in public transports and streets still remains, as DS Smith’s solution is more difficult to implement there…

(https://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/ds-smith-launches-business-coffee-cup-recycling-scheme/)

Recycling or not to recycle? / Emilie Schaefer Schaefer / Environmental Design: Materials, Ecologies, Futures (2020-2021)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0