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(lemmy.ca)
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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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Memes
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This is fascinating! Do you have any numbers on how much of the plastic that is put into recycling bins is actually getting recycled? I've read very low numbers like 3 - 10 % but don't know if accurate or still up to date.
That's an interesting question! My first reaction was "I'm not sure, but definitely more than 50%", but then I remembered that's the yield of our separation plant. I'll try to find some numbers on recovery percentages this week and update this post to give a general idea.
Once it leaves our plant, it should be recycled at high yields, because otherwise no one would bother since reworking plastic waste to raw materials takes lots of energy. And like I said, virgin plastics are dirt cheap. Some first considerations; we extract plastics like PET, PP (solid), PE (solid and film) as mono streams for higher end recycling, and a stream of mixed plastics containing all of the previous for low value recycling. There are other outputs like ferrous and non-ferrous metals, milk cartons and residual material.
Interesting! Yeah, please update / comment if you find anything.
Uhhhh, I'd be veeeery interested in knowing percentages for recycling of Tetra pak style packaging. Their website makes it sound like it's super easy to recycle them but I'd think it would be almost impossible to get this glued together mess of paper, plastic and other stuff recycled (I'd love to be wrong about that, obviously). I also read somewhere that there's like one plant in the UK that can actually recycle these but no idea if that is accurate.
So I looked up the numbers. The packaging waste is collected as a mix of plastics, drinking cartons and metals. When collected it's about 42.6% plastics, 8.3% cartons and 6.3% metal, the rest is residual waste. The sorting plant then recovers 39.3% plastics, 7.1% cartons and 5.9% metal which means over all more than 90% recovered. The plastics are recovered about 66% into mono streams like PET or PP. The other 34% is recovered as mixed plastics, which can be recycled for low value stuff.
Thanks so much for this, these numbers look amazing!
I have no idea how Tetra pak is recycled to be honest, my guess is probably by dissolving the paper in water and burning the plastic/aluminium. A coworker of mine once looked into shredding them and feeding them to an anorganic digester in order to produce biogas. According to him it gave some nice gas yields in the lab tests.
I'll fetch some general numbers on raw material recovery tomorrow and report back.
Thank you 😸