All plastics can be recycled so why are we still mining virgin materials to make new bits and only recovering and recycling 19 per cent of the 5 million tonnes of plastic we use each year in the UK?

The problem with plastics lies in economics, logistics and science. There are many types of plastic and they’re not all recyclable together – they have different qualities and they melt at different temperatures. An HDPE bottle with a PET lid and a cellophane wrapper might look great on the shop shelf but the whole bottle can’t go into one big easy plastic recycling tub, each plastic has to be separated out.

To recycle plastics effectively, households, businesses and consumers would have to separate their plastics. Given that there are seven broad types of plastic, would the average UK consumer be willing to separate their different plastics into seven different boxes? Peeling labels, twisting off plastic bands from bottlenecks and the like? We probably know the answer to that.

Then the deeper you dig, the more complex it gets. Polystyrene, considered one material, can actually contain different types of polystyrene that can’t be recycled together. And then there’s the issue of air. “Plastic packaging often contains a lot of air, creating a high volume/low weight product that’s difficult to bale and transport efficiently,” says Ken McLean at Changeworks Recycling. “This makes it a relatively low value product.”

Most damning of all is the lack of markets in the UK. The film Addicted to Plastic features a US company that makes railway sleepers from mixed plastic. McLean would love to see a market like that exist over here. “People say anything can be recycled or that all plastics can be recycled. That may be technically true but is there a market for all these plastics? No, there isn’t,” says McLean.

Rather than asking the question, how hard can it be to recycle plastics, perhaps we should be asking how hard can it be to make plastics that are easier to recycle. Does there have to be three different types of plastic on one bottle of milk? Can we not do more with our finite resources with less plastic?

“We need manufacturers to standardise on plastics. That would be a start,” says McLean. It doesn’t mean that people are giving up on the challenge. Changeworks Recycling has started to trial a collection of all types of plastic.

“It’s a fools errand if we collect a material for recycling and find that we’re not able to recycle it. More importantly, it’s also a break of promise to our customers to recycle everything we collect,” says McLean. “Collecting mixed plastics allows our customers to recycle more of their waste, around an 85% recycling rate. We just need to ensure that the quality and consistency can be sufficiently controlled to enable us to sell it to sustainable and ethical markets. It’s encouraging to note that the early signs are very promising.”