72. Why labels on bottles could ruin our recycling

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hello, welcome to Talking Rubbish, a weekly podcast delving deep into the world of recycling and discussing the truth behind snappy headlines and one-sided stories. In this episode, we will discuss the wrapper that's around our bottles. Our tablet tubes, rubbish or not, and I have a question about dyeing our clothes to make them last longer. I'm James Piper, author of the rubbish book, and I'm joined by Robbie Stanford, my far from rubbish friend. Morning, Robbie. Hey James. Good morning, influencers. Just a few days ago we were at the wrap packaging packed event doing a uh doing like a a storytelling discussion. I don't really know how to describe it. Is that what you would say? Yeah, I think a workshop on storytelling. Yeah, it was a very fun. Yeah, we got to say Morrison's sun-dry tomato paste over and over again and tell all the stories that have happened on the podcast and and just I guess reflecting on the fact that a podcast, because we get to talk for an hour about a topic in depth or half an hour if we're talking about the trash talk, we get to go into a level of detail that brands and retailers don't normally get to go into and just trying to get them to think differently about how they might communicate with consumers so that they're not making packaging choices just to make the media happy, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, it's those snappy headlines, isn't it, that that we manage to get behind and quite often they don't get the chance to. It was really good.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

And there were a lot of talking rubbish alumni there. Oh yes. I counted four. So how many interviews have we done now? We've done uh 70. So we've done 14 interviews. Okay. And I think there were four alumni. So Sabra, the two Alice's, and Esther were there. Uh yes. There we go. Four of the best. And don't let the others hear you say that. Oh my goodness. Let's hope they haven't continued listening. Um and bear in mind we're at a sustainability event. I'm always curious. You know, we've done this before where we've talked about cups and things. You get given a single-use cup or a can of water or whatever. I went into the bathroom. There's always a bathroom chat, isn't there, on this podcast?

SPEAKER_00 2:03

Oh gosh, you're not going to talk about toilet paper again, are you gym?

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Thinking we should rebrand like talking crap. I went into the bathroom, sustainability event, right? And and I had ducked out of the talk, so no one, it wasn't like a break where loads of people have been in the bathroom. There was no one who had been in the bathroom in some time. They'd left the tap on. Isn't that insane?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Well, that's shocking. Yeah, I suppose people are probably just used to auto taps now when you're in public. And so you would never think of doing it at home, would you? But it's probably absent-mindedness uh from one of the attendees.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

That is someone who's definitely on the higher side of 5.9 sheets per wipe. Trash talk. We mentioned a few weeks ago that we'd been lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to Suntory, who own Lucas Aid and Ribina, amongst other brands. So it's a Suntori Beverage and Food. And they were doing a Green Awareness Month, and they'd asked me and Robbie to basically do a trash talk for them, which was loads and loads of fun. We did some rubbish or not live, some rubbish questions, but we prepared this trash talk around labels around bottles. And we both sort of came away going, actually, that was really interesting. We got loads of detail from the Lucas A team, so thank you to all of them. And we thought this has to be shared wider. So we have put it into an episode and we're we're gonna go through sort of what we discussed, but in a bit more detail as well. We've got a bit more time here to go through it in a bit more detail.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Yeah, and this is one of those that was labelled the villain of the recycling world by the recycling association back in 2017, back when the Pringles tube was seen as the bastion of poorly designed packaging. It was unrecyclable. Obviously, Pringles have changed it now. Well, the loot the wrap around the Lucasid was on par with that at the time, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Absolutely. And we should probably explain. I don't know if everyone's going to know what Lucasid is. I mean, for me, it is the it started as a medicinal drink, didn't it? It was owned by Glaxis Smith Klein. Very medicinal. And for me, that has been LucasAid's sole purpose. It has got me through many a hangover. Those electrolytes, they do something.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

The quintessential original sports drink.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Yeah, so Lucasid's like an energy drink, and then Rubina is a blackcurrant drink. And these are just iconic British brands, right? Yeah, absolutely. Every household will know uh both those brands. But they had a big challenge, and as Robbie's alluded to, the big challenge was they were a bottle, a PET bottle, with a wrapper, and the wrapper covered the entire bottle. And we're going to talk about why that's problematic, and we'll also talk a little bit about why they did it, why it covered the entire bottle, because it is actually quite interesting, particularly in Rybina's case. And I think it's worth just saying, we're not. If like brands ask us to do talks, we're being quite picky about who we go to and who we talk in front of, and certainly who we turn a trash talk into. And I've actually been really impressed with Lu Crusade. I'll give you one example. So this guy called Damien found a report that Lou Crusade was the most littered drinks item. Which I don't think is backed up by many reports. I think most people say Coca-Cola is the most littered one. But Damien, like us, loves a pun and wanted the pun. I'm going on the Lou Crusade, which he could only get if he found a report saying Lucasade was the most littered bottles. So he decided to cycle round the country in the shape of a Lucasade bottle, litter picking. Um I found out about this because he contacted us, didn't he? And we went out and, or I went out and met him on one of his legs and uh did an interview with him, which I have no idea when or if it's going to come out, but I have had a discussion with him. He contacted LucasAid, and instead of going, oh, this sounds pretty negative, you know, litter picking, or we don't really want people to think of our bottles as littered, Fraser, who's part of the LucasAid sustainability team, went and joined him for a whole leg of the cycle ride, brought his bike out and went cycling with him and had a good chat and a litter pick. Talk about leaning in. That's amazing, isn't it, to actually face into the criticisms of using single-use packaging. Exactly. And we're a big fan of transparency and we're a big fan of brands going, look, we haven't got this right, but we'd love to find out more and we'd love to find out where the problems are. So when we start talking about labels, we're talking about packaging being sorted, basically. There's 150 sections in my book. And for each of them, I wrote a pun, right? So there's loads and loads of puns in this book, as you would imagine. Just to kind of I'd read a thing. I think it was on QI that they said puns help people to learn. That is a thing. And there is a study that's been done on this. So I thought, actually, because I was trying to explain how recycling works and I wanted people to remember it, every section sort of has like a heading with a pun. And at the time I was writing the plastic sorting section, and at the time, Love Island was massive. And all anyone was saying was my type on paper. They're my type on paper. So my pun for the plastic sorting section where I was talking all about this stuff was my type on plastic. And I put that in as my like heading. And the publishers came back and just went, We just don't get it. We do not get it. No one's gonna get it. I was like, my type on paper is massive. My type on plastic will work. Anyway, it never made it into the final book. There's some behind the scenes. We actually came up with a better pun, which I'll talk about in a second. So yeah, when we talk about the sorting of plastic and when we talk about types of plastic, my type on plastic, it's important for us to remember that it is very different to metal, cardboard, glass, anything else we buy, because metal is typically a can, you know, in the form of a tin can or an aluminium can, cardboard of boxes, glasses of bottles. So recyclers are able to go, if it's in a bottle shape and heavy, it's glass. If it looks like a cobbled box and is flat, it's cardboard. It's like super easy to sort these materials. Plastic, because it gets formed into so many different shapes, and because we have the technology to turn plastic into basically whatever we want it to look like, and it's made of loads of different types of plastic, it is much harder for a recycler to predict a whether it's a plastic material, in the case of like uh flexible, where it's 2D and it will behave like paper, and then what the plastic is made of and what chemical makeup it has. Basically, plastic is just lots of monomers joined together. That's why we call it polymer, because it is lots of monomers. And depending on what monomers you use, you get different types of plastic. So if you use a styrene monomer, you put lots of those together, you get polystyrene. If you use an ethylene monomer, you get polyethylene, which we call PE. And then depending on how tight those chains of monomers are, it tells you how the plastic is going to behave. So if they're really, really tight, then it's gonna be quite a rigid plastic, and if they're really loose, then it's gonna be more of a flexible plastic. And so that's the basic science behind it. But what what recyclers have to do is they have to go, this is polystyrene, I'll put it in the polystyrene bucket. This is polyethylene, I'll put it in the polyethylene bucket. Because if you try and recycle those things together, the different chemical makeup of them will create a weaker plastic in your recycling. So recyclers, first of all, have to work out which chemical plastic is and separate it all out.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

Yeah, that's exactly right. And so when the plastic enters a MERF, a material recycling or sometimes recovery facility, they are generally sorted just as a collective of plastic. It then requires further sorting. So here's a new one: a Perth, a plastics recycling facility, that then goes into much more specific separation through using things like near infrared technology to bounce a signal off the plastic to see what type of plastic, um, what type of monomer it's made from, or things like sink float because they have different densities. So um once it's shredded up, put into a tank, they will sink or float at at different sort of densities.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

And that near infrared technology is exactly what my type on plastic was replaced with, because it was replaced with near, as in N I R. Near, far, whatever you are. I'll be glad when this book is pulped. So this is where plastic, and we talked about it before that uses carbon black was a problem because the signature was difficult to read. Um, some people mistakenly think, oh, it blended into the conveyor belt. That's not true, it's just its signature didn't bounce anything back because it's just basically it's carbon black, it doesn't have a signature in that way. So people have moved away from that specific pigment. Um people have moved away from that because it couldn't be read, and we've started to get what's called detectable inks. It's also where the Leucusid and Robina sleeves were becoming a problem, but because they were covering the whole bottle, the near infrared technology was basically reading the label, not the bottle. And so the bottle would be PET, the label would be something else, a PE probably, and the label was being read. And so the bottles were getting missorted. And this is why it was seen back in 2017 as one of the worst packaging types.

SPEAKER_00 11:11

Yeah, because it was basically misreading it as the wrong material, and it was literally contaminating uh a load because it was going in with the wrong stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:22

So there is a very interesting point here around why you would use a different material for the label to the bottle. Okay, because the easy answer, of course, is just to have a PET label wrapped around your PET bottle, and then if it reads it, it's reading it correctly. Recyclers do actually want a different material between the label and the bottle. I think we talked about it before. Tesco produced this rag list, so this red amber-green list on where they wanted packaging to be. And that they did this for their suppliers to say we've looked at the infrastructure, we've looked at the market, and this is what we want. So if I just to give you some examples of things on the red list, uh rigid black plastic is on the red list, plastic straws and cutlery, glitter, compostable PLA, biodegradable plastics, oxo-degradable plastics, things we've talked about before. These are on the red list, which is not to be used basically by suppliers. On the amber list, they had PET flexible films. And on the green list, they had mono PE or PP films. So Tesco, as part of their red amber greeness, and other retailers will have done the same, but Tesco sort of led the charge, said, actually, we don't want PET films. They're a bit harder to recycle anyway, but we want PEPP flexible films. One of the reasons for that is because when you put it in the sink float technology, so when you shred up your packaging and you put it into uh into basically a big uh pool of water that has a chemical in it to create different densities, so basically you can sort plastics in this way because some types of plastics will float and some types will sink. But having a different label to a bottle means that the PET bottle sinks and the PEPP film floats. And separating the bottle from the label is really important to improve recyclability, and so you actually want your label around your bottle to be made of a different material.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Yeah, and so one of the big problems with this sink float is the fact that you get these inks and adhesives on the label that then ends up contaminating the PET bottle stream, which is the gold mine for recyclers. PET bottles have been widely recycled for decades and decades now. So anything that contaminates these inks and adhesives from a label is really a huge problem for the yield that they get.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

Yeah, so if you had PET labels and they were sinking with the bottle, then the inks and adhesive that are on the label are going to contaminate that PET stream. So you need it to be a different material. So hopefully that's explained why the label should be made of a different material to the bottle. Now, interestingly, the USA does the exact opposite on this. So the FDA, which is the Food and Drug Administration, they want everything to be made of PET, the label and the bottle. Now, this is because in the US, inks are less of a problem. And it's because it's because they use a hell of a lot more water. So the USA, what they're doing is they wash their packaging in basically new water all the time. So they're constantly cycling and flushing new water. But in Europe, we recirculate a lot of our water and we reuse a lot of our water. So the more inks you have going through the process, the more that's contaminating and getting worse and worse and worse and degrading your recycling.

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Wow, that's crazy. And presumably the filters aren't catching and pulling out all of those inks. It's too difficult when recirculating it to purify it to the same level as just fresh water.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Yeah, so it's just completely different processes, mean that you have completely different advice from your various stakeholders. It's really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Yeah, not easy to navigate for a brand though.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Oh, absolutely. And I mean there's new tech coming onto the market. You can now get floatable PET sleeves. So this even though they're both made of PET, the sleeves will float, the bottles will sink, but these aren't approved yet by anyone. There's all sorts of different things going on here. Okay, so just to summarize, we've got two things that need to happen to sort our material. We're doing a near infrared sort, working out its signature and deciding what kind of material it is. And having a big sleeve means that it may get missorted because your sleeve is made of something different from your bottle. And we've hopefully explained well enough why your sleeve will be made of something different from your bottle, and so why you end up in that situation. Why did Lucas aid Ribina have to use a full sleeve? I guess that's an interesting discussion. And actually for Ribina, this was a specific reason. Because I remember years ago the Ribina um sustainability team telling me that because of the makeup of Ribina, because it's black currants and because of the way that it's produced, the sun actually will change its colour and it will go from a purple to more of a brown in the sun. So the full sleeve was actually a requirement to keep the product looking good. It didn't change the taste, the flavour, it didn't make it go off. It was just a natural colour change. But people obviously perceived it to be less fresh. And so they kept the full sleeve to make that happen.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

And and it's not that the full sleeve stopped it from changing colour, it just masked that it would be a different colour.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I think it did slow down the process significantly. It stopped the sun getting through. It stopped the UV of the sun, I think. So to change to a half sleeve, when they decided they were going to do that, the RD team actually had to work really hard to reformulate Ribina to so that it was less sensitive to light. Yeah, but still did taste the same, which is critical. Something none of us would ever think about, right? It's unbelievable. So for NIR to work, basically, what we think, or what the industry thinks, is the sleeve needs to be less than 60% of the bottle. That is actually really complicated because it is really hard to work out what percentage of your bottle is covered by a sleeve, because bottles have all sorts of weird shapes, don't they? You know, every brand has their own contours and design. And it is quite hard to work out percentage coverage and it's quite open to interpretation. So for that reason, there was a change in the RAM, wasn't there, Robbie? Because originally I think this was part of the recycling assessment methodology.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Yeah, that's right. So the government introduced this recycling assessment methodology to do something very similar to what Tesco's had done, to be honest, the red amber-green rating in terms of packaging, and then there's going to be these modulated fees if your packaging is red. And the first draft that was released, you know, as a public document, did have these sleeves and a percentage covering of a container as part of the requirement that might turn your packaging to a red listed rating if you just covered it too much. Now it was dropped partly because it was really hard to work out the percentage of the sleeve, but that's not beyond the wit of man. It was because some of the reasons why you would use a sleeve for preservation reasons, is one and that we mentioned earlier, the coloration and things, um, but is also because sleeves are sorted in different ways, as we've literally just discussed. So the government or PAC UK, I should say, the system administrator for extended producer responsibility, they're going to relook at this issue in the coming years. They've now got a working group that looks specifically at this methodology. And I think they will bring something in that will probably be somewhere around 50 to 60% of the bottle is the maximum uh amount of sleeve that you can have. But at the moment, it's not that sort of killer blow in the recyclability assessment methodology that we thought. And when it comes to getting ahead of legislation and trying to kind of guess how you would ensure that you aren't red or amber rated, you know, you still have a highly recyclable bottle. And also to make sure you're doing the right thing, this is where Suntory have kind of got ahead of the curve. And the sleeves are now made of PET, as we kind of mentioned before. And the Ribina ready-to-label drink is like 25%. The Ribina concentrate, the 600mm one is 49%, the 850 milliliter equivalent is 53%. So maybe a bit of work to do there. The 1.5 liter is 51%, again, only just over that threshold. And then when it comes to Lucas aid, both their energy and sport drink is at 50%. So clearly, this is something that they're dedicating time to try and ensure that they reduce that sleeve, still get the benefits of having one, but not damn the whole recycling process.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

And these are massive projects. I think we need to just explain how hard it is to change a sleeve, because in my mind it's like the Morrison sun-dried tomato paste to some people. You should be able to do it in eight days. You know, that is not how this works. Take LucasAid an example. That manufacturing line produces 3,000 bottles of LucasAid energy every minute. How are you gonna stop it to go quick, change the label? It doesn't work, it does not happen. So Ribina took two years uh to get into a half sleeve, and that costs about 1.6 million. And LucasAid, uh, I think took a similar amount of time, but they went after the Ribina went first. Um, LucasAid costs six million pounds.

SPEAKER_00 20:21

Uh so why was LucasAid so much more expensive?

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Yeah, so LucasAid Energy and Sport just use a floatable PEPP and Ribina uses something called OPP, which is an oriented polypropylene. I'm not going to go into the details of what those are right now because we're going to run out of time. But floatable PEPP, the one they use for LeucAid is more expensive than OPP. And then just the bottle redesign and the mold investment, you know, this is to do it and to make it so that the label stays where it is and is tight against the bottle, you actually have to just completely redesign the mold. You have to stop the lines, you have to restart them. It's not just going through a sustainability team, you have to go through the marketing team, you have to go through everyone. I think it's Tropicana. There was a very famous case study where they just changed their packaging and they lost they lost 20% of sales overnight. So you have to spend a lot of time going, is the packaging we're turning this into is it right? Is it actually going to affect customers buying our product? Um, obviously that that is an important point alongside the sustainability angle. But yeah, so I think for me, if I had to be negative about this or just at least a bit thoughtful about it, I guess there are some brands out there that put something on the market that's such a problem that when they fix it, everyone celebrates it. And I always sort of just think, why was it a problem in the first place? You know, so that we celebrate the new Pringles tube and you just think, but the first one should never have gone on the market. And we celebrate half sleeves, but it's like we should never have had full sleeves. I think in this example, because these are such historic brands, we are ultimately talking about filling lines that are so old and And you know, would develop at a time when no one was thinking about sustainability. They would just think about how do I get my product people? And you know, Lucas aid starting as a medicinal product has a very different reputation and brand history to another soft drink company. Although I guess not dissimilar to some of them, like Coca-Cola probably started in a similar way.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

But the optimist in me would say, well, surely this kind of packaging wouldn't be designed from the ground up now and have these unintended consequences through the recycling system. But quite often when I'm seeing new brands come to market with these fast-moving consumer goods, it is crazy and wacky packaging that allows them to get the jump on the market. And then we're still seeing bad packaging. I mention it almost every week, but Buzzballs is a great example of how this still goes on. Bad packaging. And maybe one day we'll be sat on the podcast and think we've had such a big impact that buzzballs have changed to a fully PET buzzball bottle or whatever. But you're right, we shouldn't be celebrating that. We should be saying, look, what were you doing in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Uh the other thing to remember in terms of how long this took was what was happening at the time. So really this was called out around 2017. That's when this was starting to become big news, and f sort of the half sleeves started to get released around 2020, 2021. At the time this was all being discussed and the labels were becoming a big issue when it was labelled as the environmental demon or whatever it was called in 2017. That was around the time we were also developing the sugar tax in the UK. And sugar tax meant that brands had to reformulate their product to reduce the amount of sugar in it. And because that had a very direct cost to your business, I guess a lot of the efforts went on, right, we'll start with the big hitter, which is sugar tax, and then we'll move on to packaging. And so that was another reason why this took quite a long time, I think.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

And I know with the recent budget, they've pulled in these coffee and milk-based drinks that have high levels of sugar. And so the scrambling that those brands are doing now to reformulate so that they don't have to pay the tax is exactly what Lucasaid Ribina were going through at the time.

SPEAKER_01 24:16

So yeah, I mean, whilst it is uncomfortable for a brand to be called out, like Pringles were and Lucasaid Ribina also, um, it does definitely facilitate change. I guess one of the most interesting things for me is the length of time it takes. This is not a quick process for lots of reasons. And whilst we as consumers definitely expect quick change, it's almost impossible unless you're Morrison's on your sun-dried tomato paste. Thank you again, Natasha. And RAM and EPR has issues, of course. You know, we've discussed those in previous episodes. But one of the benefits is that it helps say what good looks like, and hopefully in the future we'll avoid these obvious issues that, in my view, are largely branding and marketing from entering the market. So as we wrap up this section, I figure it'd be quite nice just to thank the Santoria team for hosting us and inspiring this episode. And particularly people who we know listen to this podcast enjoy it. So, Greg, Michelle, Fraser, Charlie, thank you for hosting us. And special thanks to James for sharing a lot of the details that we've covered in this episode. I think I mentioned last week that uh lots of people had written in saying Sainsbury's have paper-wrapped toilet rolls, and I said I'd go and buy some to do some comparisons on weights. And I kind of wanted to link this into our rubbish question last week where we talked about plastic paper, whether I would recommend plastic over paper, because this is a great example. It's not individually wrapped toilet rolls, it's just that Sainsbury's have moved from plastic wrapping around their toilet rolls to paper wrapping. Now I mentioned in that toilet roll episode that I'd actually struggled to get recycled toilet rolls in any other supermarket, and it it turns out I was wrong. I went to another Sainsbury's and they had packs of nine recycled toilet rolls all over the place. So I can't actually remember which Sainsbury's I went into before, but they certainly didn't have any when I was initially looking. So last night I got the scales out and I was weighing the difference. Uh so Sainsbury's was working out at 1.06 grams of paper per 100 sheets. And we can compare that to weight rose, which was 0.48 grams of plastic per 100 sheets. Now, last week we talked about would we substitute paper for plastic? And we still have to work on our numbers. One of the key ones is weight differential. And I was suggesting that if the plastic was half the weight of the paper or less, I think plastic's better than paper. This one is actually 45%, so the plastic is 45% of the paper weight, so it's actually under my metrics I created last week, potentially better. I quite like this paperwork toilet roll. So I am tempted to use this as our number. And instead of saying half, say 45%, and we'll always remember it came from the same space toilet roll calculation, and that's our starting point.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Do we think that works? It's too difficult to go do the life cycle analysis because we'd have to do it every single time. So we do kind of have to pick a number, don't we, if we're going to have a rule. And why not that one?

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Why not a number that starts us off? You know, we've actually got a real world example. So just to put that in uh really simple terms, because I feel like I this is because we do so many percentages, it's a bit complicated. What we are saying is if we're replacing plastic with paper, we are okay with plastic if it meets our three quite criteria. So it's recyclable, it contains at least 50% recycle content, and it weighs less than 45% of the equivalent packaging of the paper alternative. And that gives us our starting point for saying, okay, plastic's okay and paper's bad in these if it meets these three criteria. And so we've now set that 45% based on a real-world example rather than just my half that I made up last week.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

And I've got an addition, uh, an addition from a long time ago, back uh episode 10, I think it was, when we had an interview with Nick Tauday from Bauer Collective, who do refill, reusable, returnable packaging. And those interviews are a great chance to do a deep dive into someone's perspective. We obviously do one every five. And he talked about some of the real difficulties in standing up a kind of postback system for refillable laundry products and personal care. And we talked a bit about what format they used, how could they get to price parity with their competitors, what are the best filling machines, etc. But what he wasn't prepared for was our Discord. And so we had Samantha write to him quite close after the interview to say, look, I've been using your products, but I'm not seeing the pouches coming through. You can scan the pouch to see how many times it's gone round the system. And quite often the pouches that she was receiving were the first on the first trip, effectively. And so what he found when Nick went on to try and say why that was, they're scaling up as a company. So lots of the packaging is on its first trip because there are lots of new customers who are moving from single-use packaging to refillable packaging. And what happened eventually through this uh Discord discussion was Samantha, who's the chair of Sustainable Devices, a local community action group that's quite nearby to where uh Bowers fulfillment center is, they went and did a field trip, which happened a week or two ago now. Apparently, it was a great event, uh, brilliant for them to see transparency and actually see the pouches getting refilled. And it coincided with October, where they had actually just refilled as many pouches as they'd seen returned, and they could see this quality assurance process and the refilling. And eventually it ended up that this local community action group are going to take old stock of Bowers that they can't sell for various reasons and uh donate them to this charity. So, all in all, an addition of a good news story.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

It's amazing. I'm so pleased. I love it when this podcast creates real-world things, and uh and that's so nice. So uh Samantha, I hope you had a good time. We also had, I think Alice was also saying the same on Discord, so maybe she needs to arrange a tour as well. Nick might be inundated here, he might have lots of tours going on, but um, but I'm really pleased that that's happened. So thank you for doing that, Nick, and thank you for engaging with our listeners. And I've got a correction. I a lot of my corrections seem to come from me trying to make a joke, but particularly about things that aren't recycling related. I should stick to my stick to my wheelhouse, stop going outside of the colour.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

Stay in your lane, James.

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Stay in your lane. The one thing I definitely am not is a nutritionalist. And I discussed the Wagyu Burger King burger, and I converted the energy to produce a ton of cardboard into calories to work out how many burgers you could eat for equivalent energy, which was sort of just a bit of a joke and just meant to be a bit funny. Someone with the username What Have I Learned on TikTok got in contact to remind me that nutritional calories are different from mathematical calories. I'm slightly shocked I can't remember this from my various diets over the years. But when you look at a piece of packaging, of course, it's K cow, not cow. Yes. So we measure nutritional calories in thousand calories. So I was out by a factor of a thousand, and that means it's actually only eight and a half thousand burgers uh that you could eat with the equivalent energy to manufacture a ton of cardboard. Don't try and be a nutritionalist. Now, the interesting thing about this is they're actually quite close to each other. So I think it was 13,000 burgers and then eight and a half thousand burgers was the equivalent energy. So I guess I was just reflecting on the fact that at the point that you've eaten 65% of your burger, that's basically the energy required to make the cow the cardboard that you're eating it out of. Which I think is just quite interesting, isn't it? It's like I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna be exactly 65% of the way through the burger and go, okay, the energy I've just received is the same as the energy to create that cardboard box. We'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, EcoSurety, who are on a mission to rid the world of unnecessary packaging. They help brands navigate the tricky world of extended producer responsibility, but that is not all. They also collaborate on some incredible recycling projects and consumer awareness campaigns for those tough to recycle materials. If you're an organization looking to make smarter packaging choices, check them out at ecosurety.com. And the best thing you can do to help us grow is to share us with your friends and family as more and more people are doing. Thank you so much. And to leave us a review. And if you leave us a review, you can be Robbie's review of the week.

SPEAKER_00 32:52

This week we've got a review on Apple from a user called Hannah in Devon. So I think that's probably a person called Hannah who lives in Devon. I like the literal title. Uh so the headline is My Litter Picking Tunes, which is right up our alley, isn't it? Um, the body of it says, I used to listen to music whilst litter picking, but not anymore. You are both funny yet informative. I find myself laughing out loud in the middle of the woods, and as passers-by give me odd looks, they don't know what pure entertainment I am listening to. The different discussions and topics really vary week by week and keep me up to date on Enviro News, all whilst chuckling over bad humoured fish jokes or recycling bin days. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Thank you so much, Robbie in Bristol, for reading Hannah in Devon's review. Very, very good. Really, really nice review. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. And we're getting quite close. I uh I'm not doing this again, this competition, but you know, last time we were getting towards 100 reviews and we had a little competition on Apple versus Spotify. Guys, we're getting close to 200. We're at 185 on Apple and 180 on Spotify as we're recording this. So if you want to help us get to 200 on both platforms, that would be amazing. We only need like 35 people across the two platforms to do that. So, yeah, really, really would help us out. And you can follow us at rubbishpodcast, you can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. Also join our Discord, it's the easiest way to engage with us and listeners of the show. And the link to all those things is in the show notes. Rubbish or not. Uh I've saved this rubbish or not because it actually came from James at LucasAid.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Continuing the theme.

SPEAKER_01 34:46

Yes, he uh big fan of the podcast, as we know. And James, we really appreciate you writing in with a rubbish or knot that I've never thought about. It's really, really, really interesting and a genuinely a big surprise to me. But what we're talking about today, I called them tablet tubes as in our intro. I think the easiest way to describe them is barocca. Everyone's gonna know what barocca is, right? But we're talking about like those tubes for tablets that dissolve in water.

SPEAKER_00 35:15

They're sort of like hydration tablets, yeah?

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Yeah, they're hydration tablets. So, Robbie, these are rigid plastic tubes with a plastic lid, based on that information. Are they rubbish or not?

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Well, I must admit I use these so uh for a hangover, but sometimes if I just need uh some hydration, a pick-me-up kind of thing for well, general wellness, and I always put these in my recycling bin with the other rigid plastics. So I'm gonna say, or not.

SPEAKER_01 35:43

I'm going to agree with you, so let's not panic. On the side of the tube, it says cap-on recycle. It says cap on recycle. The reason I am so shocked by these, and I had no idea, is they have in the lid silica beads to stop moisture developing in the tubes.

SPEAKER_00 36:01

Ah, yes, because obviously they need to be dry, these tablets. If I've once got a drop of water in them and it just turns to mush instantly.

SPEAKER_01 36:09

Yeah, so you need to keep moisture out. So what they do, like with um like when you buy shoes, you know, in the shoe box you get a little pack of beads, in the lid of these tubes is silica beads. And I didn't believe it. I've never, you know, I've bought these before, but I've never really studied the lid. So I went out to go and buy Barocca and some own brands, took the lid off, and there it is. There's like a word under the lid that says do not eat. And if you tear that bit off, you can see all the silica beads inside. Wow, I'm gonna have to have a look at this myself. Yeah, so I did have a question as to whether that was recyclable or not. So I reached out to APRL because obviously they put the label on the side that says cap on recycle. And Alice came back to me. Thank you, Alice, saying uh they had a similar query from a different vitamin supplier recently. Uh, they ended up speaking to Recoupe, who helped provide some of the recyclability assessments for brands. Uh the silica is used as a desiccant, as we know, to keep the water out, and it will be released from the cap when it's shredded at the reprocessors. So therefore, it is deemed compatible with PP recycling. So what's going to happen is they're going to shred the tube, they're going to shred the lid. The silica beads are going to come out, they're going to go, I don't know where, the runoff is a contaminant, but the lid itself, the plastic will get recycled.

SPEAKER_00 37:17

Wow. Okay, so we are still saying recyclable and leave the cap on.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

I am at the moment, I am wondering, we've got lots of plastic recyclers listening. If anyone feels this is not right, I'd love you to get in contact because I'm genuinely surprised. I thought when I saw that they had this silica beads in, I assumed recycle the tube, not the cap. Yeah, me too. I'm being told by industry that actually it's fine. Again, if there's plastic recyclers listening who have a different view, let's add it in as an addition and correction. Rubbish news. So Biffa have come out to say that with the right policies, the UK could process all of its own plastic packaging waste onshore without any public investment. Yay! Yay, Biffa. What do I say? That's so good. Longtime listeners will know my very, very strong views that the UK should reprocess all its own waste, get it to a pellet form, and then it can export it, make it valuable before it leaves the shore, so that it's unlikely to be exported to a country that can't manage it because it's already at the point that it's valuable. And this is a report that Biffre have issued that basically imagines that world. They're saying it would require 800 million pounds of private sector investment in world-class recycling infrastructure. It would mean building 15 new facilities that would be capable of processing an additional 900,000 tons of plastic waste every year. That 800 million pounds of investment would get 900 million pounds of economic output each year, which would include at least 100 million going back to the Treasury as taxes. It would create 5,400 new jobs, both direct and in the supply chain. This is great. It's a really, really interesting report, and it does show that we could achieve what my dream is to avoid the export of plastic in in an unprocessed form. Now, uh the report actually went into what it would need from the government and what it would need in policy to make this happen. So these are the measures it proposed, one of which we know isn't going to happen, but at the time of the report was a bit of an open idea, uh, which is the plastic packaging tax. So they wanted to see an escalator to 50% compared to the 30% that we've got today. So brands would have to include 50% recycled content to avoid the tax. And you would need to increase the value of that tax. Now, pre-budget, everyone was saying it sounds like the plastic tax might go up to 50% and be £500 a ton instead of £250 a ton that it is today. That did not happen. So there was a lot of murmurings before the budget came out that it the plastic packaging tax would be a bit more dramatic and a bit more interesting and potentially drive a lot more recycled content. But the government have actually just gone with an inflationary increase in the plastic packaging tax, which in my opinion is a missed opportunity. You know, a real missed opportunity. So that's the plastic packaging tax piece. They also want to see certification for food contact recycled materials, which would drive a cost differential between food grade plastic and plastic that's just going into uh things that don't need to be food grade, and a phased ban on the exports of plastic waste, which would then create a predictable demand for UK capacity. So none of these things are in the plan in terms of policy, none of these things are coming true right now. But I think it's great to have a company, okay, Biff have a vested interest, obviously, to do more recycling, but it's really great to do this kind of report where they say, actually, we could do it, and it would actually be really positive for the economy. So how do we do this? And government, here's the three things you have to do, none of which we're doing at the moment, but let's start campaigning for it, I think.

SPEAKER_00 40:45

Yeah, great news. I've also got a I suppose a good news story, and it comes from Durham, a BBC local news report that I picked up, where they are introducing vape and batteries collections from people's homes starting in spring next year. And the reason that this is so important is because vapes and the lithium-ion batteries within them often register on the talking rubbish radar because of the fires that they can potentially cause if they end up in the wrong place. They can be an absolute nightmare for councils and waste management companies if they end up in the general waste bin or even in the recycling collections somehow found in the bottom. So well done to Durham County Council who've decided to do something about it and to get out in front of it and start these collections in spring. They'll be asking people to put the batteries and vapes in a separate bag that's going to be left out next to their food caddy. So another thing in the sort of line of bins that you put out, but it will go into trucks with fire safe compartments. And this is one of the really important things and the difficult things about collecting these from people's homes is that you do need a fire-safe compartment. The last thing you want to be doing is asking people to put these things out and then finding that actually the fires are then occurring in the trucks or in the transport, and that's also as much of a danger as it is when it gets to the recycling facility itself. It's important to say that this will complement drop-off points that they already have in their household race recycling centres, and also many of the drop-off points that you can now see at supermarkets if you want to take your batteries and vapes back there. So I'm hoping that in the future, I know we get batteries collections in Bristol. You just need to, you know, bag them up and put them out with one of your recycling collections and they get taken. But that is not commonplace across the whole of the country. So this is great news that another local authority is trialling it. Hopefully, they keep going and hopefully more councils follow suit.

SPEAKER_01 42:51

And it's interesting you mentioned fires there because next week our trash talk will be all about fires in recycling centres and trucks. So look out for that. So we had a question from Sean's on Discord. Uh and they were trying to be more environmentally conscious when buying new clothes and avoiding doing so unless absolutely necessary. They say they used to buy new black trousers whenever the colour started to fade, and they were asking the question would it be better to try using a fabric dye? So the question is, is it better when our clothes start to fade to dye them or to buy new?

SPEAKER_00 43:30

This is right up my alley because it's something that I've done numerous times. Uh those who watch our clips on social will probably have noticed I wear a lot of black. And I've had the pair of trousers that I'm wearing at the moment has been redyed once, and I've got two or three other pairs of very similar black trousers that have gone through two or three processes of being re dyed. So I didn't do any research about this. But my own personal habits, because it's quite easy to du re-dye something black, to be frank. Uh this is something that I do for lots of my clothes.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

Do all your clothes start off brighter? Did you like have a phase in your twenties where you were like really bright clothes and then you've got to a point where it's like everything just has to get dyed black? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Nice. And I don't know if you use this product, but the product that I found and looked at because they had the most interesting research was dylon. Is this what you use?

SPEAKER_00 44:28

Yep, that's the exact one I use. They've got a few different types. So you can do it either in your basin, your sink at home, or you can use the one that goes into the washing machine. So I use their washing machine um version, and you have to be really careful to make sure you wash out your washing machine afterwards, otherwise uh everything goes black.

SPEAKER_01 44:48

Great. Well, let's talk about this. So their slogan is re-dye, don't rebuy. Gotta love that. That's nice. And to get the dye to work, you have to wash your clothes three times, as you will know, Robbie. So you have to wash the clothes first of all. You have to apply the dye, and then you do a final wash to remove the residual pigment. Now, I guess the observation here is that means for two of those cycles, you're only washing the clothes that need dyeing. Obviously, in the first cycle where you're just washing your clothes, you can do that with other clothes. But that's going to have a higher carbon footprint because if you're just washing your jeans, Robbie, you're running two cycles just with your jeans. And to do three cycles in your washing machine consumes roughly 60 litres of water. But if we compare that to the production of a single pair of new jeans, creating a pair of new jeans uses about 8,000 litres of water. Oh my gosh. That's for the production of the cotton and the irrigation of the fields and all the things involved in it. You are comparing 8,000 litres when you buy a new pair of jeans to 60 litres running through three wash cycles. That's pretty compelling. Yeah, and obviously the carbon will change depending on your power source. So I'm entirely renewable in my house. Um are you on a renewable tariff robin? Yeah, the same bit. So, you know, there'll be a uh we'll have a lower carbon than perhaps the reporting, because the reports look at averages across the UK. So they commissioned a report called fast fashion versus fabric dyes, which was a really, really interesting read, actually. I'll put it in our link tree. So if we take some of these types, here's the difference. So to produce black jeans or trousers, it's approximately 14.5 to 21 kilos of CO2 equivalent to produce those, 14.5 to 21. Redyeing is 1.6 to 2.5. So it is six to 13 times better, depending on your power, depending on how much water you use, the heat, all those kind of things to die compared to buy. Every single category they looked at, so black jeans, navy jeans, navy t-shirt, black t-shirt, cotton duvet cover, cotton bath sheet, everything showed that it was better to die than to buy.

SPEAKER_00 46:53

Wow, that's really compelling stuff and heartening that I have been doing the right thing. Because quite often the uh jeans I'm wearing or trousers, they're not worn out. They just look sort of tired, and the colour does go out of them, and they sort of go kind of a greyish colour. And once they get re-dyed, they literally do look absolutely brand new. It looks like a brand new pair of trousers.

SPEAKER_01 47:20

And it's more popular than I realised. So this Dylon dye, which is owned by Henkel, they sold three million units of dye in the UK. Yeah, and in their sales, actually, so this is Henkel owned the brand Dylon, and they said that reviving genes was the most common reason for people buying their product with 44% of 20 to 44 year olds using the product to renew the colour in their jeans. If just 10% of the 26 million adults, that's 20 to 50 year olds, decided to re-dye an existing pair of jeans, so just 10% of us re-dyed an existing pair of jeans, just one pair, the saving in CO2 would be 49,000 tonnes, which is the equivalent of nearly 16,000 round-trip flights from London to Hong Kong.

SPEAKER_00 47:59

Okay, folks, again, dyeing. That's shocking.

SPEAKER_01 48:02

I can't believe the impact that it can have. Yeah, I guess the one thing I couldn't quite work out was the environmental impact of running dye through your washing machine. So dyes are usually synthetic and not fully biodegradable. Wastewater treatment plants will remove quite a lot of the dye, but not all of it. So some of it might reach the water course. But the quantities from household dyeing are low. They're not, they're definitely not ideal for aquatic ecosystems. And I guess the logic I came to is obviously when our genes and products are manufactured, they're getting dyed, and wherever they're made may also have this issue with the dye running into the water course and potentially causing issues. So I think it's better to dye at home and get it into our water treatment facilities where I hope they can deal with most of it. But if there's anyone listening from the water industry, as there inevitably will be, and you have a different view, please let us know because we will add it to our own additions and corrections. In terms of what we can do at home to reduce the environmental impact of dyeing, make sure you use the washing machine's full rinse cycle to ensure the dye is diluted as much as possible. Um, that's definitely going to help as it runs off. So yeah, and avoid dyeing very small loads, you know, store up a load of clothes that you want to turn black in Robbie's example, um, just to keep your life simple, and do a whole load. And again, there's lots of information on their website about how you can do that, and that would mean that you're running fewer washes to dye your clothes. Residual rubbish. This is something that has happened to us this week that has made us feel like an emoji. And I'm going to be angry, I think, today, but in a nice way, in like a I want to improve the UK sort of way, because simpler recycling came in for businesses in April 2025. And Robbie just give us a really quick overview of Simpler Recycling for Businesses.

SPEAKER_00 49:48

Yeah, so basically they've got to separate their waste into separate items. So there's food waste, there's paper and cardboard waste, and then there's plastic cans, bottles.

SPEAKER_01 50:04

Yes, and it's that separation of waste that's really important and having different bins for your different materials. And today my residual rubbish is about Greg's, the bakery chain in the UK, with I think about two and a half thousand outlets. Every Greg's I have walked past, I have to go in to see if they're all like this. But every Greg's I've been into since April 2025 has a sign on their bin which says recycling in England has changed. Our new recycling station will be here soon. Please hand us anything you would like to recycle.

SPEAKER_02 50:35

Really?

SPEAKER_01 50:36

So I sat in Greg's, I watched people. Do you think anyone gave any packaging back to people at Matil? Absolutely not. Zero zilch. Never gonna happen. It has been eight months now, Greg's. You need to change your bins. And the thing I'm most annoyed about is new Greg's have opened since April 2025, and they also are not separating waste. So in your design plans for your new Gregs, surely you're going, Oh, well, we might as well put the new bins in these ones. So look, I know the Greg's team listened to this. We know these guys, and uh, we've worked with them before, and I know they really want to do the right thing. I know that. I'm sure there are reasons, and it'll be store layouts and all sorts of things as to why they're not separating their waste. But I do think it's time to replace those bins and join Morrisons in the talking rubbish hall of fame. So I am gonna reach out to the Greg's team, let them know we've talked about them, and hope that we can see change soon because I just think eight months is long enough to change your bins, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 51:35

Totally agree. Yeah. And my one is a happy sad emoji. I'll go with the sad first. As avid listeners will know, I'm a sparkling water guy at home. So I thought I'd find the perfect solution for the CO2 canisters uh for my soda stream at home. It was a company where they deliver basically four of them in a very nicely sealed plastic case, but I didn't read the small print. Apparently, you had to consume these four bottles within four months, which I wasn't able to do. So I got them to give me an extra month extension. I still couldn't get through all of the bottles. We just I just don't clearly drink enough sparkling water quickly enough. So unfortunately, I'm having to send these back so that I don't get a fine for these uh bottles that I've I've basically leased the bottle. So you buy the gas inside them, but you're leasing the bottle. They continue to own it. So I'm gonna I literally tomorrow is my last day to post back these bottles, and one of them is full. So I'm posting back an unconsumed bottle of CO2, which is the bit that's making me really sad and slightly annoyed. But I've had loads of interactions with their customer service, and there's clearly reasons why they need uh these bottles not just sitting in people's homes but being turned around very quickly. So I've been looking for a new supplier, and a flyer came through my door just last month, it was, which I kept just in case, and I'm really glad I did, of a local supplier in Bristol who literally does drop-offs door to door. They've just expanded into my area, and they will be dropping me off a locally supplied canister of CO2. So all is not lost.

SPEAKER_01 53:23

As always, thank you all for listening. Thank you for the reviews and engagement. We love getting the opportunity to do this podcast every week, and we just love that so many people listen to it. So join our Discord, follow us on social media at rubbishpodcast. You can email talkingrubbishpodcast at gmail.com or you can WhatsApp us. And everything we've discussed today can also be found on Linktree. And the details to all those things I just discussed can be found in the show notes. There's nothing left for me to say other than see you next Bind Day. Bye. Bye.