Do you know what happens to your plastic recycling after your bins are emptied?

As we continue our journey through the plastics pipeline, we encounter bin juice and the Mafia.

Lancaster University’s Dr Clare Mumford and the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM)’s Richard Hudson take the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives project to the final stage of its process – how plastic waste is dealt with.

It turns out plastic is not very sociable – one type does not get along with another – and this just adds to the complications when it comes to recycling.

We talk about the importance of being able to predict how much waste people are going to produce; the post-Christmas purple polypropylene surge; the need to properly sorting your plastics before recycling, and how to avoid recycling contamination; why moving away from plastics does not automatically mean greater sustainability; and public pessimism over what happens to their recycling.

Discover the wonderfully named Association of Cleansing Superintendents of Great Britain and how it grew to have 17,000 members in its current iteration; cringe at the perils of bin juice; and feel the tension rise when Paul’s jokes about the waste management industry being a front for organised crime turn out to be closer to the truth than he imagined.

Learn more about plastic packaging and how it can be processed in the Fifty Four Degrees article here: https://doc.your-brochure-online.co.uk/Lancaster-University_FiftyFourDegrees_Issue_21/14/

And read the PPiPL white paper, Waste Matters, here: https://zenodo.org/records/10839761

Episode Transcript