Future of recycling

To The Independent

Robert Jenrick, the Exchequer Secretary, has said he is committed to reducing singleuse plastic waste. Yes, taxing non-recyclable coffee cups and plastic straws are good things to do, but their comparative volumes in the face of everincreasing plastic production, single-use or not, are minuscule and potentially token.

In addition to these relatively minor gestures, I propose a radical upheaval of our domestic recycling systems. At present, local authorities pay large sums of money to waste-management companies to collect, sort and, hopefully, recycle domestic plastic waste. Yet they recycle only one-third of it and ship the rest off to other countries to… well, no one is quite sure what, although an awful lot ends up incinerated, in landfill or in the oceans. And we are now receiving our comeuppance. China is refusing to accept low-grade plastic waste. Poland is even sending it back to us.

The council tax we pay for these wasteful and destructive processes could be put to far better use. With rapid progress now being made on carbon capture, home-based pyrolysis (waste-to-energy) units and a plethora of other plastic-to-fuel processes, there is a strong case to stockpile any plastic that is difficult to recycle in compacted or granulated form at 10% of its previous volume in readiness for the time that it can be used as feedstock for negative-emissions energy production and other innovative uses. We used to have grain mountains and wine lakes, so why not plastic mountains for a short while? Patrick Cosgrove, Bucknell