A new report from Swiss consulting firm SRI Consulting suggests that the yield from PET recycled bottles is 50 per cent or more, meaning that placing the bottles into landfill may lead to a lower carbon footprint.
According to Eric Johnson, a research analyst at the Zurich-based consulting company, recycling is not the most efficient way to handle waste management of PET bottles. He added that firms needed to examine all the plastics collected. Author of the report PET’s Carbon Footprint: To Recycle or Not Recycle, Mr Johnson outlines the carbon footprint of processing the PET’s in recycling facilities.
During an interview, Mr Johnson said that recycling only makes sense if it is decreasing the carbon footprint of the material. He continues saying that for every 100 tonnes of PET collected, there must be at least 50 tonnes to come back and be placed in other products. According to Mr Johnson, that is not the nature of the PET recycling industry making it useless to recycle from an environmental and economical standpoint.
He also said that countries with adequate landfill space and not much recycling infrastructure are better off sending the plastics to landfill because that is the lower carbon option. Both the National Association for PET Container Resources and the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers declined to leave any comments regarding the report, which came out on 9 August.
The report analysed PET bottles’ carbon footprint by following the material from production of raw materials straight to disposal of the product and the secondary packaging from birth to end of life. Based on the evaluations, Mr Johnson concluded that the best kerbside recycling programmes for such materials were found in Europe, but that it was still not enough yield to justify recycling over sending the bottles to landfill. Mr Johnson said that the biggest issue is that kerbside recycling collects a lot of the material, but that very little is actually recycled once it is sorted and separated.
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