Why it’s worth recycling

Why it’s worth recycling your plastic

Household waste recycling is not the most glamorous of subjects nor is it the most exciting domestic chore, but personally what gives me a kick is seeing just how much junk we are preventing from ending up in land fill sites. My family of 3 have been collecting ALL our plastic waste over the past nine months and now it’s about time to spread the message about just why and how and what we hope to achieve by doing this.

The first thing that inspired me to start routinely sorting our household plastic waste was my sheer disgust at just how much plastic we were disposing of, straight in the trash. I thought to myself that if every household was like ours there must be a lot of this stuff being taken away and shamefully covered up in the ground and left for future generations to deal with. Plastic packaging seems to come with everything these days, not least of all food products. Before we started separating our waste we were emptying our kitchen bin at least once a day. All of this trash was destined for incineration or worse still land fill -apparently it can take anything up to 1000 years for even the most light weight plastic shopping bags to degrade. Now we take out our trash every few days.

We live in Oslo, Norway and the recycling facilities are to be fair quite good. When we started recycling our plastics I knew that the council were planning to open a more local collection point in our area. It was my original intention to just collect our plastics until this depot opened but since I had already built up a nice stockpile and since I had the extra basement space, I thought why not collect it all up for a year and see just how much we would build up – a visual reminder of just how much of a burden we place on the environment.

Ok, that explains my motivations, but which plastic items are we actually collecting?  Unfortunately its a bit more difficult sorting out your plastics than it is your glass bottles as there are so many different kinds and unfortunately not all councils accept all kinds of plastics.  If you’re serious about recycling then you’ll learn first to identify by the labeling, afterwards you’ll be a plastics expert and will be able to identify the type of plastic by visually and by its weight.  The kinds of plastic we are talking about here is plastic bags and wrappings, any plastic that contains food, empty toiletry bottles, you name it, anything that serves a containing function, that can be rinsed out and crushed down.  The most common symbols look like these:

The numbers make it easier to categorize the plastics, most food packaging is 5 PP and 6 PS, that is polypropylene and polyethylene and, plastic bags are usually 4 LDPE (low density polyethylene).  Your local waste collection authority can inform you which “numbers” they collect. Luckily ours accept all of the above types which spares us a lot of time sorting out plastics.

Next time I will describe what happens to our recycling waste, which companies are doing the recycling, what profits are to be made and by who and just what are the benefits compared with incineration and landfill. But for now I hope that after reading this you will see why it is worth recycling given just how easy it is to do so and just how much recycling will contribute to a better environment for both ours and future generations.