Reprocessors need to 'top-up' with costlier source-segregated bottles from Europe, and this is affecting what manufacturers end up paying for their bottles and trays with recycled content.
Jonathan Short is md of Eco Plastics' 300,000-bottle-an-hour plastics recycling facility in Lincolnshire. "Three years ago, plastics bottle content in an incoming bale was up to 95%," he said. "Now, the most you'll ever see is 80%, and even that would be rare." Proportions can be as low as 40%, he added.
Once fractions of moisture, dirt (including grit), glass, paper and metals as well as other plastics are extracted, the final yield can be as low as 50% or even 40%, according to reprocessors.
Md of Closed Loop Recycling in London, Chris Dow said he has to spell out to customers how the bottle price is only part of the story. As contamination levels have risen and yields have dropped, costs have increased, and these need to be passed on, he explained.
So why the shift in quality? To some extent this comes down to consumer confusion over what should and should not go into the recycling bin. "Last year, there were around 260,000t of bottle scrap collected in the UK," said Short. "But by my estimate, that figure should be over 400,000t."
He also believes this is to do with the age, and lack of sophistication, of some materials recovery facilities (MRFs) that perform the initial sort. "The collection system needs to be aligned with the MRF that's going to be doing the sorting," he said. "There's no point putting fully commingled waste through a 10-year-old MRF."
Ed Kosior, md of plastics recycling consultancy Nextek, links the drop in bale quality to both the higher volumes of commingled waste being sorted and the quality thresholds being set by MRFs. "Output has been speeded up, without the same level of due diligence," he said. "Effectively, the lower standards acceptable to Chinese buyers of exported waste have become the de facto quality standards for UK recycling."
Many point out that, by including dirt, water and other non-recyclables in bales, waste operators are not only upping their own saleable tonnage but avoiding landfill costs they would otherwise incur themselves and which, instead, fall to recyclers.
Short at Eco Plastics explains that Germany, with its government-run recycling system, uses defined bale specifications. "In the UK, we have a fragmented system that's grown on a commercial rather than a government-driven basis," he said.
The argument for bale specifications is strong, said Kosior. "Recyclers would get a fairer deal, and MRFs would have a far clearer idea of their own true efficiency," he argued. Another option would be for waste operators and recyclers to agree prices on the basis of recyclable content.
In fact, according to Dow at Closed Loop, there are moves afoot in the US to design international standards for the content of exported waste. Such a change would strengthen the recycling supply chain and encourage future investment, he said.
How far off such standards are, though, remains unclear.