77. Is recycling a scam?

SPEAKER_00 0:00

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 whether recycling is a scam. Are tea light candles rubbish or not? And I have a question about whether dead batteries are still dangerous. I'm James Piper, author of the rubbish book, and I'm joined by Robbie Stanafort, my bar from Rubbish Friend. Morning Robbie. Hey James. Hello, how are you doing? Yeah, very good, thank you. Tell you what, Bristol Waste did not take my wrapping paper. Did you have this issue? What? No. Had a whole box of wrapping paper in the paper bin, I'd done the scrunch test on all of it. Just as a reminder, the scrunch test, if you scrunch up wrapping paper and it doesn't spring back, then it's recyclable. Now I've got a load of wrapping paper I've got to take to the dump. They just left it. Yeah. Have you checked your neighbours? Did they leave theirs too? It wasn't mine. They must have looked at it and thought that's too much wrapping paper. Definitely was something I personally did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Oh, that's annoying. Anyway, let's wrap that up. Let's move on. I had an email over Christmas from uh I'm not going to name this person just in case because I didn't ask them whether I could read out their email, but um I have to read out this last paragraph. It's so funny. She was asking us about the sources of one of our bits of our episode. So we did we'd had the discussion and she wanted the source of something because it was relevant to her day-to-day job. So I went away and found that and sent that or had that discussion. And she ended her last email to me saying, I was going to use American hyperbole to say, I can't wait for your next episode. But then I realised I can indeed wait, and in fact, likely won't think of it for the next couple of days of holiday. There's honest. There's American honesty.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

That was very straightforward. We respect that though. We'll enjoy the episode when it comes, I'm sure, but not waiting with baited bread. I'm not wasting my holiday thinking about it. Yeah, I completely understand. I haven't wasted my holiday thinking about it either.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Is recycling a scam? And I thought this would be a good episode for us because just to read you some comments, Robbie, from a recent video we put up on TikTok. Here's a few of my favorites. All recycling is burnt. It's all a lie. All clean plastic and card is sold to wasted energy plants and burnt. You know what happens to recycled plastic. It's shipped to Turkey and buried in a mine. And of course, recycling is a scam that led to the title of the episode. So, Robbie, what do you reckon? Is recycling a scam?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

What planet are these people living on? I mean, it's not all perfect, but it's definitely not a scam. Are they literally thinking conspiracy theory it all actually gets burnt?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, I think there's this general theme, isn't there, on our social media and all social media that everyone sort of works in these black and white, you know, if you look at those words, it's all a lie. All clean plastic and card is sold to wasted energy. You know, it's like you didn't have the word all. If you said some, I'd agree with you. But yeah, let's talk about it. I mean, I guess first up, there is an obvious problem here, like the elephant in the room, is that you and I have worked in the recycling industry for a couple of decades, and we have facilitated the recycling of over 10 million tons of packaging in that time. It's not going to shock anyone to hear that I believe recycling is real. Otherwise, who's been paying us?

SPEAKER_01 3:37

That's a very good point. Where will any of the money come from? What some nefarious people are paying us to hide the secret that it all goes off to a mine in Turkey.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

I suspect we will end this section by talking about flat earthers, as you would inevitably expect. I guess it's like, look, you're talking to the people who've been to the moon and seen the earth. We have we've done the recycling. We know it happens. So it's interesting. So I'm hoping people tune into this thinking it's a scam, I want to learn why maybe it isn't. Hopefully, this is useful because we're going to go through some of that information as to why we feel we can say recycling is genuine. But the elephant in the room is that we have worked in it for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

And and that means there's going to be an extreme amount of bias in this, bias towards the facts of recycling.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Yeah, we always have that bias, of course. Uh there's not much we can do about it. But I will agree. So there's loads of things I do agree on. The recycling industry does suffer from a transparency problem. That's definitely true. It's why we set up this podcast. I do not believe the industry is honest enough about data. They have a tendency to mix up the act of collecting waste with recycling it. So, look, I collected 100 tons of plastic. That's all been recycled. Can you prove that's been recycled? No, no, but I collected a hundred tons. It's like there's we don't people aren't very good at going, okay, but what actually happened to it? Was it upcycled? Was it downcycled? Did that bottle become a bottle? Did it become a jumper? You know, all these things need to be added into the mix. And I do think there is a transparency issue with the data. And I I, for various reasons, we'll talk a little bit about it. Lots of people are incentivized to make recycling appear better than it is. And so once you start introducing doubt and you end up creating holes where the newspapers can come in and say, look, loads of it went off to Turkey, so that's what happens to all of our waste. The conspiracy theories step in and close the gaps, and people start imagining that all of their waste must be going to Turkey.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

And I suppose that's the point where we say the podcast isn't incentivized to make recycling appear any better than it is, because we're trying to get to the truth behind the snappy headlines in both directions. Not just in this episode, there's more recycling happening than some of these uh flat earthers, so to speak, think. Uh, but also at times saying, look, we do collect lots, but not all of it ends up getting recycled, as we've talked about in previous episodes.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

The only incentive we have to pretend recycling is amazing is to get people to sort and clean their waste better. You know, that's really it. Our goal here is to help people understand that recycling does happen. And to make it happen, you have to sort and clean your waste. If you decide it's not happening, if you decide it's a scam, then you're less likely to do that. You're like, oh, what's the what's the point? I'll put it all in the general bin. So we do have a slight incentive, but I don't think it's a particularly bad one. Have you seen that cartoon where it's like, what if we make the world a better place and climate change isn't real? Well, it doesn't matter, you've made the world a better place, right? It's like, what if I actually sought and look after my own packaging and my own waste and take responsibility for it and recycling doesn't happen. It's like it doesn't matter. You did a better thing by taking that extra time and taking responsibility to think about what you bought. We do happen to think recycling is real, we're going to talk about that. And it's just worth noting there is a part two to this conversation that we're going to cover in the future, I don't know when, in a few months, about this whole mixing, the recycling and general bins on collection. I've had a lot of comments around I was sat in a fast food restaurant and I saw them just mix the bags together between the recycling and general waste, and that happens a lot. And I can understand why that feels very disheartening. I can understand why that's difficult. We're going to do a whole episode on the mixing of waste when it's collected, but we're not going to cover that today. Just to put some caveats on this, we are also going to have to focus on the UK. Because in somewhere like the US, I think the claim recycling is a scam holds a bit more truth. You know, when only 5% of your plastic is recycled and you have a real focus on landfilling, I suspect it does feel like recycling is a scam. Why would you wash and separate it if you if you think actually this is just going to end up in landfill? And that's why things like EPRs are so important for the US system to get them focused more on increasing their recycling rates.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

It's not perfect in Europe either. It's a lot further along. So, in a way, recycling is a scam is something that would have held more truth in the UK in the 90s because people would have started to have separated things and we hadn't yet built the facilities to deal with all of them. It's much less of a truth in the UK now.

SPEAKER_00 8:30

And I think a lot of the comments that I'm seeing do focus on plastic. I think when people think recycling is a scam, they tend to think more about plastic than the metals or cardboards. So we will come on to that. But first, let's talk about recycling as a whole. So in 2024, the Environmental Services Association, which is the ESA, published a report that valued the UK's recycling industry and waste treatment sector at £24 billion, employing £147,000 people. They've got to be doing something. Exactly. There you go. And that's the end of it. You're absolutely right. I mean, what why are all these people employed to just ship stuff away? So 75% of that 24 billion, so the amount of money, the turnover basically, of the waste industry, 75% of that $24 billion is made up of three categories. Uh the commercial and industrial collection of waste at $6 billion. So that's from businesses. Local authority collection is $3 billion. On our EPR episode last week, we talked about the fact that the EPR bill is like $1.5 billion. So just to explain the difference between that, that's because EPR is focused just on recycling and local authorities will also have costs to collect things like food waste and uh general collections, which aren't covered by EPR.

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Yeah, other things um that turn up at local authority sites too will be included in that non-packaging stuff. There's all sorts of things you might need to get rid of.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

So about half of the bill is covered by EPR for our local authority collections. And recycling of that 24 billion pie, the money made from recycling, the turnover from the recycling industry is 7 billion, which makes it the largest piece of the pie. The largest bit of the 24 billion is linked directly to the recycling industry. And in terms of people, when we talk about those nearly 150,000 employees, around half are employed collecting our waste. So that'll be from businesses and households, with the rest spread across treatment and recycling. So that is about 75,000 people who are working on our waste after it's been collected. And I guess that's my first thought. You sort of alluded to it, Robbie. What are they all doing? If all of our waste was just shipped to Turkey or shipped abroad, you don't need 75,000 people. You need dozens with some phones, I suspect, arranging some ships. You know, it's not particularly hard to take a load of mixed material that you've collected from a house, chuck it on a ship, and send it off to Turkey. The first kind of clue that we've got that recycling isn't a scam is the amount of people that are involved in sorting our waste after it's been collected.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

And you don't really necessarily need loads of people either, because recycling is highly mechanized. The actual reprocessing of stuff is very mechanized. Whereas in the collecting, you do need those refuse operatives combing up and down the streets, picking stuff up, putting it in the back of a lorry, separating it, etc. And so even though the act of recycling is very mechanized, still half of the people are working in that waste treatment end.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

So in its simplest form, and we have explained this before, but just we might have new listeners. And actually, this is probably a good opener episode for people, um, because it's a good overview of recycling. But in its simplest form, the recycling process is a series of stages, each of which have a cost. And you are trying to make the end product worth more than all of the costs added together. You know, so it's the same as any product that you might manufacture. So when we say things like all of our waste is sent off to be dumped on a roadside, that is the equivalent of saying a toy company or a drinks company. Let's take a drinks company, they made a bottle of drink, they put all of the cost in, they put the drink in the bottle, they sealed it, and then they put it on a roadside. You know, that's the equivalent of what you're saying there, because you've incurred all of the cost up to the point that you shipped it out. So why wouldn't you then try and sell it for money? And I think that's something people forget that actually every stage of the recycling process has a cost. And the first cost happens when our waste is collected. Before it's even got to a recycler, or before it's got to a Murph, our waste has a cost attached to it. So it is in the interests of the Murph and the recycler to make that worth some money because you've already incurred some cost the second it arrives to you, and you now want to make that worth money.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

The first bit is often the very difficult and expensive bit. The running around grabbing stuff is a huge logistical operation that just like when you're trying to send a parcel, trying to collect a parcel, it's very, very expensive to do that. And to do it efficiently at a very low cost is hard.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

So if we imagine the journey our waste is going on, a local authority collects our waste. The waste is sorted, it is shredded and cleaned, it is melted down or pulped in the case of cardboard. Each of those stages has incurred a cost. None of them make money. The only thing that makes money is at the end when you sell it for something.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

Yeah, so you've got staff, energy costs, material costs, it's all totting up as you go along, meaning that you really are staking a lot on making some money out of it at the very end of the process.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

I think it's worth here talking about gate fees. This isn't something we've really talked about before, but it's a really important part of where our waste goes. So a gate fee is literally what it sounds like it's a fee to get past the gate. And our waste has three primary routes it will go down. There is also composting, in vessel composting, anaerobic digestion. So there are some other routes, but that's typically our food waste or compostable uh packaging in councils that collect it. But typically our waste has three routes: landfill, incineration, or recycling. It is just worth reflecting on the gate fees of each of those, because that will tell us where our waste is most likely to go. And helpfully, RAP, who are an organization that do lots of reporting and we've talked about them many times, do an annual report that summarizes gate fees. So I looked at the latest one, and these are the different costs. So for a landfill, if you want to send a ton of waste to landfill, the gate fee is actually quite low, but you have the landfill tax on top. So the pound per ton rate of getting your a ton of your waste into landfill is about £130 a ton. If you want to send your waste for incineration, the average gate fee for incineration is £121 a ton. So they're pretty similar. £120, £130 if you want to incinerate or landfill your waste. If you want to send your waste to a MERF, it's £82 a tonne. So you are at a a third saving, basically, if you send your waste to a MERF compared to if you send it to an incinerator or landfill.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

So if you've got a load of mixed recyclable materials and you've got these three options, you're saving yourself 40 or 50 pounds to bother sending it to a MERF to be sorted into its constituent parts and then off to be recycled thereafter. Why you wouldn't do that, beggars belief.

SPEAKER_00 15:43

And crucially, the MERF then wants to sort and make money out of the waste. It doesn't want to send it off for incineration because that's just additional cost. You've got to pay the gate fee as you go into incineration. So you don't want to be doing that. The £82 is actually a gross fee, which does not take into account rebates that local authorities receive, because they receive rebates because what they're sending is valuable material. And so if there's lots of metal in there, there'll be some money back. So the average gate fee net of rebates is actually £42. So that means it is three times cheaper after rebates, as in net income, it is three times cheaper for a local authority to send waste to a Murph than it is to send it for incineration or landfill.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

There's definitely an economic incentive to do the right thing there. But that's obviously the caveat is that you must be collecting recyclable material in the first place, not just black bag waste where it's all mixed up and you might have the odd bottle in there, but it's also mixed with food and dust out your vacuum cleaner and all the rest of the rubbish that would go into your standard bin.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Yeah, the Murph won't accept it. Yeah, and you end up with different fees. Obviously, if you've curbside sort it, like we do in Bristol, you will potentially get more than someone who's co-mingled it and mixed it all in one bin, the recycling rate. So there's all sorts of different things at play. I'm presenting just the median average in terms of the figures. Our household recycling rate is about 45%. However, there is room to grow as about 50% of our waste is sent for incineration and 5% to landfill. So we do have a lot going off to incineration that we should be diverting back to recycling. And over time, what we're going to see is the incineration in landfill costs increasing significantly. These gate fees will go up a lot because the landfill tax is increasing. And uh with ETS, which is increasing the cost of incineration. So I don't want to go into the details of ETS, but there's a piece of legislation that's going to increase the cost of incineration, it will make that gate fee difference so much bigger. So more and more waste will be sent off for recycling.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

Yeah, and I think it's also what of that 50% sent for incineration can be recycled. And as we know, the biggest proportion is still food that doesn't get separated and collected by many households in the UK. And so this isn't just about recycling in the context of the classic smelting aluminium and uh milling cardboard, uh, melting plastic, etc. It's also what else is in the bin besides just those packaging materials.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

And there's people who might be thinking, I don't believe them, MERFs don't exist. So just to explain the ESA report on this, there are 108 Murphs in Great Britain, and four of them handle over 125,000 tons a year. They do exist. We've been to quite a few, Robbie.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Yes, we have. Yeah, I can I can confirm uh that there are definitely operations out there that are sorting the paper from the glass, from the plastic, from the uh rest of the materials.

SPEAKER_00 18:39

I'm glad you explained what a Murph was. I suddenly thought we've got quite far through this episode about explaining. So just to be clear, a Murph is where our mixed waste goes and then gets sorted for recycling. Once you've sorted it, you're sort of so far into the process that you want to recycle as much as you can. So just to summarize where we've got to so far, everything in the recycling process is a cost until you get to the end when the waste has a value. It's a bit more complicated than that. Of course, there'll be recyclers listening saying, but I got value when I sorted it and shredded it. And you know, but I think in the main, everyone is paying for a different part of the chain because they're expecting the waste to get to the end of the process. So companies are taking our waste from our households in the hope of making money. And of course, we see flaws in that, like as evidenced by the Oxfordshire fly tip we talked about in episode 71. Because there you've got a company that was paid to manage waste. So somebody has said, can someone come and get this from me? And they have paid a company to come and collect it, who has then just dumped it. This is the same as if you paid someone to collect waste from your house and you didn't do the proper checks and you found it dumped down the road. So there's always going to be people who take advantage of it of this system. But on a large scale, with organizations, the largest like Biffa, Veolia, Virador, you know, they want to take a load of waste, sort it, and make it as valuable as possible. So why might recycling be seen as a scam? We've sort of done an overview there of how recycling works. But as I said at the start, I think to be honest, the data is our first issue. Um, we do tend to get data on what has been collected and processed, but it doesn't really go any deeper. So I think we've given the example before of when you export waste, what you export is what is classed as recycling. Whether it's whether you're exporting a load of rubbish or good recycling, it's what ended up on the ship. Now that is changing, isn't it? We've got some new rules coming in now in January around the country having to accept the waste that has been exported from the UK and say, I'm willing to accept this waste. I've looked at it and it's high quality and I accept it. And only then is it classed as recycling.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

Even though that's being introduced, there are still many companies out there who just don't want to tell anyone where their waste goes. They think that this is a competitive advantage. Even though it is going off and genuinely being recycled somewhere abroad, they don't want their competitors to know about this little recycling operation that they've found and outbid them to send their recyclable waste there instead. And it's this idea of competition between these exporters of waste for recycling that stops there being greater transparency. And I appreciate their position that they think that that's their competitive advantage. But what they don't see is that as a whole, the industry gets a bad name because if you're not willing to tell anybody where the stuff goes, then people will fill in the gaps as they have done with this recycling is a scam. There's a reason why they won't tell you where your waste exactly goes. Where is the exact facility that it got sorted at? And I think that's one of those things. That in a sort of higher order of magnitude, the industry has to get together so that they can, at least in this first instance, tell the government where it's going, so that somebody in the re environmental regulators can see where it ends up and that it's genuine. But actually, ultimately, greater transparency for the average person is required beyond that.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

And aside from data, I mean, as we've talked about before, recycling is completely economically driven. And so it switches on and off as the market dictates. We've talked over a number of episodes about plastic recyclers closing sites, and we lost 200,000 tons of UK plastic recycling in the UK in 2025 alone. You read stories like that, all plastic recyclers are shutting down, and it is then quite easy to make the leap to, oh, that means plastic isn't being recycled. I can completely understand why that might make people feel that way.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Yeah, but as you say, then there's a great big giant leap that they're making from recycling isn't as good as some people say it is, all the way to it's a total scam and none of it really actually happens anyway.

SPEAKER_00 23:09

And I think generally people then the leap is oh, if the UK recyclers are closing, the waste is being exported. And if it's exported, it can only be going to Turkey on a roadside, you know, and those are some big leaps to make because not everything that's exported is exported badly. In fact, I would go as far as say most of the exports will be correct, and increasingly so because the government are putting more and more blockers into exporting our waste, which is great. So a lot of exporting will be correct, a lot of domestic is correct, and there are fringes and there are percentages and there are things that are happening to our waste that is not correct. I think what did we say on the waste crime episode? You know, 30% of our waste is illegally managed. But let's say that's true, which is a very high figure, let's say that's true. That still means 70% is correctly managed. So the stuff you put in the bin, and by the way, I don't necessarily agree with that figure, and I certainly don't think it's household waste. I think that will mostly be business waste within that 30%.

SPEAKER_01 24:06

And mixed waste that wasn't ever destined for recycling.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

Exactly. Because of the chain of local authorities to reputable companies to then them wanting to prove that recycling is happening. I just think most of our household waste is managed correctly. But that doesn't stop the fact that incorrect things do happen. It's just I don't think we should then change our behaviour to go, oh, I won't bother recycling then, because you've read a you've read a bad news story. That would be a real mistake. And I I do think it is fair to say when people think about recycling being a scam, they definitely have in their mind's eye plastic. That is definitely true. And in 2024, the Centre for Climate Integrity published a report called The Fraud of Plastic Recycling, which got quite a lot of coverage. Um I read it at the time. Now, in my opinion, this is quite a flawed report. It spends a lot of time saying it is uneconomical to recycle plastic. And it spends a lot of the report talking about like the 1980s and when plastic was becoming very big and how I guess the summary of the report, if I was just to distill it down, is companies knew when they were making things out of plastic that plastic couldn't be recycled, and they just pretended it could be. They pretended it was economical to recycle plastic, knowing that it wasn't economical. Right. So there's some truth in that, definitely. Not every plastic makes money. PET does quite well because lots of bottle companies have committed to use recycled PET. Other types of plastic, flexible film, just have a cost. You know, they they're not going to, at the end of it, be worth more than the amount of money you put into getting them recycled. This is true. The report is kind of factual in that it says people are putting plastic on the market knowing it doesn't have value, as opposed to like an aluminium can which you put on the market and definitely will be valuable and will make more money in the recycling process than it cost at the start. The reason I don't agree with this report is because none of the routes that plastic can go down are economical. So, yes, it is correct to say recycling plastic is not economical in certain types of plastic, but it's also not economical to landfill it or burn it. Because landfilling it is £130 and burning it is £120. So there is no route for our plastic. It's not like there's a magic paid-for route for our plastic to go down. As the costs of incineration and landfill rise, so the gap between incineration landfill and recycling gets bigger. And it's really important that reports recognise that rather than just focusing on, oh, they've put a product on the market that isn't economical to recycle. I enjoyed that moment where you realised what I was saying, Robbie. There was a moment where it all made sense. And I hope for everyone at home. They also had that moment. I guess this is the question: does this conversation, this economics around it, make it more likely for a plastic to end up in the ocean than any other material? You know, I don't think so. I've I think there is a strong argument to say plastic is more damaging for the environment and the things we've talked about before. And so it ending up in the ocean is worse than other materials. I think there is a strong argument for that. But remember that our waste doesn't get sorted and then end up in the ocean. It doesn't get sorted and then end up in a fly tip. Because once you've incurred the cost of sorting, you sort of have got to the point where you've got to do something with it. It's cost you so much money to sort it. Have you ever seen a fly tip on the side of a road that is just plastic? You know, clean stream. Like, think about that Oxfordshire fly tip. It's a mix of paper, uh, earth, uh, metal, plastic. It's all in there. It's uh it's a mix because they haven't incurred the cost of sorting at that point. They decided to dump it before that point. So the stuff that ends up in the ocean, in my opinion, is extremely unlikely to be sorted waste. The difference is the plastic floats and the glass and the metals sink. So we don't see them.

SPEAKER_01 27:59

No one's dumping a perfect ton bale nicely bundled up of PET bottles on a roadside somewhere.

SPEAKER_00 28:07

No, they got loads of value. Yeah, you're not gonna do that. And so I guess the point of saying that is if we think of our waste, it's getting collected. And that point there, when it's been collected, is the highest risk of it being fly-tipped or mismanaged because you've only incurred one cost, the cost of collection. Once you've started incurring the cost of sorting, cleaning, shredding it, you are very unlikely to dump it. And that's why we say things like, Why can't we process all of our waste in the UK? Why can't we get it to a pellet form and then export it? That would be so much better. And remember, we we have this real focus on plastic, but we use in this country in packaging two and a half times more paper and cardboard than plastic. We use more glass than plastic by weight. Um so I do not want to undermine the impact of fly tipping or illegal exports. You go back to episode 27 if you want our views on that. But I do want to put it in perspective that we are talking about all materials, not just plastic. And if we talk about just plastic, it is unlikely to just be dumped in the way that we're thinking about it. We've talked about some countries that maybe mismanage their waste, they don't have bins, they don't have curbside collections. Esther talked about Indonesia, and those countries are trending towards more plastic in their packaging, and those are the things that ends up in watercourses and waterways. So the you know, I don't again, I don't want to undermine any of that. I'm just saying that at the point that it's sorted, you are very likely to then want to do something with it to make money. But and just as a reminder, in the UK, we do recycle huge volumes of the packaging coming out of our homes. So we recycle about 75% of cardboard and paper, around 70% of the metals, 65-70% of glass, and about half of our plastic. You know, this is what is recycled in this country. Now there's issues with that data. We've sort of touched on it. Is it downcycling or continual recycling? Is are our PET bottles becoming PET bottles or are they getting downcycled into benches? You know, that's not part of the data. And so there will be gaps, of course. There will be all sorts of things like illegal exports. But I would hazard a guess that of the waste coming out of our house, the majority of it is managed correctly. And we should not be put off recycling because of the news stories we read that are pretty horrible. And I, you know, I hate reading them, and they make me very frustrated at the industry, and these fly tips are extremely frustrating. It will never stop me recycling. And as I say, my concern is this belief that recycling is a scam is what drives people to be skeptical, which reduces their likelihood to separate and manage their own household waste properly. And that is the only thing that makes recycling unlikely if we don't take care of our own waste. And as I started this section, for me, the best comparison to this claim is the belief that the world is flat. So if I believe the earth was flat, and have you heard this joke about how flat earthers say there's there's flat earthers all around the globe? So good, isn't it? So good. But if I believed the earth was flat, and I was one of the flat earthers all around the globe, I would buy a weather balloon online, had a quick look, £100, you get a semi-decent weather balloon. I'd attach a camera to it, and I would solve it myself, right? I would go, okay, I believe the earth is flat. I'm gonna just check, because actually it's pretty easy to check. So I'm in this position where I have seen recycling with my own eyes. And I think if you're listening to this and you're still skeptical about recycling, you can do the equivalent of buying the weather balloon. You can contact your local MERF or recycling center, you can book in a tour, and you can go and see it and engage with it, and you might start feeling like it is worth sorting your waste. Additions and corrections. Just noticed this thing post-Christmas. I was thinking about food waste. Um, partly because I'm eating so much leftover. I'm still going through the new year leftovers, you know. Frozen a load of stuff. Anyway. Retailers were giving away excess veg just after Christmas. Do you see this? No, I didn't actually. I think I saw a picture on social media of Audi giving away veg around the 28th of December. Very cool. Yes, very cool. I agree. I mean, I love free stuff. Well, yes, you're you're the prime candidate. I guess it was just an observation that it wasn't disappearing as fast as usual. Okay. Even though it was free, people weren't taking it. And I sort of had this theory that the retailers had slashed prices to like 5p a bag just before Christmas. So um, certainly the discount retailers and others had to all price match down to like 5p. And what you've done at that point is devalued it so much in people's minds that actually the difference between free and 5p isn't huge. I don't think people were taking this stop because they were like, oh, I've already got loads, I bought loads for 5p. And actually, it's not even worth free because it's so close to what I paid for it just before Christmas, right? And so I wonder if there's an increase in food waste because of these competitive prices that have happened. I also wonder if a lot of this leftover veg, it's not just about the prices, but also to do with this kind of need that we all have. And I I don't speak for myself here, although I do sometimes with presents, not with food, for people to go and do their Christmas food shop up till the evening of Christmas Eve. You know, I think there I think some people leave it so late that the supermarket thinks, well, we need to make sure we have veg right up until the point we close on Christmas Eve, which inevitably means they're going to overstock. And it would be much better if we sort of agreed as a nation that we were going to taper this. We would say, okay, you can definitely get veg up to the end of the 23rd, but around the 24th, you're sort of running on about a 50-50, and then by the end of the 24th, sorry, you're not going to get veg. And we'll all kind of get used to we have to shop a bit earlier so that the supermarkets don't feel the need to overstock, so that they don't feel they've got to give away the veg. I also couldn't really understand why they weren't just giving this to charity. I think some of them did. I think that's probably where it all ended up, but couldn't quite understand why it wasn't just going to homeless shelters or food banks and why it was just being given away in general. But, you know, I I think some of it did end up going down that route. But it's just interesting, isn't it? Our perceived value of food if you spend all the time in the run-up to Christmas discounting so heavily, when you then give it away after the period, people don't care. Well, you do, Robert, you would have run into it. I didn't even know. I wish I hadn't. I'd have a fully stocked fridge, no? Yeah, yeah. Potatoes in the freezer. Absolutely. And I thought I'd do a bit of a Britta water filters update. They were our rubbish or not in episode 58. Um, I noted something recently. So we talked about taking Britta water filters back to supermarkets, back to a store. And in the UK, I still think that's true. I checked. Um, they still have the same drop-offs I found before. So Tesco, Waitray, Sainsbury's. So that's all good so far. In America, it's a bit of a different story. In America, they use TerraCycle, they don't take it back to supermarkets. And if you go to the US TerraCycle website and look for Britta filter recycling, it says join the wait list. And I think they've closed. For now, maybe temporarily, and it may have changed by time as goes out, but from what I could see, it had switched from sign up to the Britta TerraCycle program to join the wait list. And I know we've promised this TerraCycle episode for a long time and will continue to do so until I get round to writing it. But um, this is a good example. You know, I think people get used to a method of collection and recycling, and then suddenly it gets switched off. And we talked about it, I think, with pens, didn't we? Where it was like, I could take my pens back to Ryman's. Rymans decide not to do it anymore. You can't, you've got nowhere to take your pens. It's the same with Britta water filters. So just an observation that this is why we need proper recycling infrastructure rather than kind of these voluntary company-led schemes, because once the company decides not to fund it anymore, you've got no route for your waste. And we had an email in from Nicholas, and this was following episode 73, where I mentioned I'd found a book on the Bristol Hippodrome in the bin. Oh, yes, on holiday. I remember that. Yep. That's right. And we'd asked some influencers whether they'd had good bin finds, and I got quite a few in. Uh enjoyed Nicholas, so he emailed the bin box to explain what he'd found. Uh he said he was a member of his community orchestra and runs the refreshments, so for the rehearsals and concerts, and they had a plan to serve spiced apple juice at the December concert two years ago. Oh, this is sounded great. Yeah, I need an invite. But he couldn't work out how to heat the apple juice without spending money. Okay. So then he had a broken electrical item to dispose of, took it to the local library to put into the small electrical bin. We've never given the library as a place to take your electricals. That's some local libraries do have them, yep. And when Nicholas opened the lid to the bin, he saw a 10-litre water heater. Um, it had a cable, a plug, it looked unused, so he took it home and it worked fine. And it's now been in use for three years. And he did side note confirm that he made sure it was electrical safe before using it. So just to do the uh terms and conditions on if you find electrical items in the bin, definitely get them tested. But um an amazing find, Nicholas. That's great. 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 our podcast grow is share us with friends and family. That's your mission for this week. Just tell one other person about talking rubbish, and we'll double in size. So that would be great. But the other thing you can do is to leave us a review. And if you leave a review, you can be Robbie's review of the week.

SPEAKER_01 38:14

And this is another one we found via Apple. It's a five-star, and whoa, it's a long one, James. This. So you strap in. It's a it's a longie, but a goodie. Alexander Portnoy. Thank you very much for this one. So the the headline is inexplicably wonderful listening. Become the rubbish nerd your parents warned you about.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

I'm not sure my parents ever warned me about this career.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

I think my parents warned me about it when I was a 40-year-old man after episode five of this podcast. You're heading that way, Robbie. I'd just like to warn you. So here we go. Thanks again, Alexander. Long time listener to podcasts, medium time listener to talking rubbish, first-time reviewer. When I tell my friends that I listen to a podcast about recycling, they roll their eyes in worry that I am becoming a grotesque parody of myself. And few of them take my entreaties that it's a great listen seriously. Those that do take me seriously, out of parental obligation, have caught the bug hook, line, and sinker. Inexplicably relaxing and endlessly informative. Robbie and James listed in order of propensity to laugh like an elephant seal. Elephant seal, that's a new one. Are engaging, knowledgeable hosts whose wisdom is great for passing off as your own and lovely company. I listen as a silent third wheel of a conversation between friends that just happens to refer to extended producer responsibility and DRS as though I too know what a Murph looks like and all is right with the world. Everywhere you have people, you have waste. Rubbish is therefore the most universal of subjects. The teeming systems that keep our pavements free of spilling bin bags, or even more pertinently, not. My thanks to all the bin men and bin women, in brackets, bin people, question mark. It's actually refuse operative if we want to be um technical about it. The recycler pros, the washer-outs of jars and cans, the landfill enthusiasts, packaging nerds, and assorted recyclogeeks. And to the podcast and podcasters that lifts the bin lid on them. I salute thee. Consider me binfluenced.

SPEAKER_00 40:32

Oh, thank you so much, Alexander. It's such a good review. It's a good review. Very fun. I love a thoughtful review. I appreciate that. Elephant Seal. I'm thoroughly offended. As I say, I love an honest review. Thank you. You can follow us at rubbishpodcast on all social media. 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 listener to the show. And the link to all of those things is in the show notes. Rubbish or Rot. An email in from Ian who was asking about tea light candles. So we covered some of this back in episode 32. We covered glass candle holders. Um I listened back to prepare for this and I'm sure we corrected it because you'd said that glass candle holders could probably be recycled, and we know some of them can't be because they're toughened heat-proof glass. So while we didn't say it in episode 32, I think we did correct it to say, if in doubt, you know, throw it out, that kind of mantra, because there's no way of knowing if the glass candle holder is good for recycling or not. So it's probably best just to go into general waste. But it's good to flip this and talk about tea lights so that they appear in our directory. So metal tea light candles, Robbie, rubbish or not?

SPEAKER_01 41:54

I was I thought about this at the time because I had misunderstood the original email back from episode 32. So I've given this some thought. It's aluminium. And so as long as you can scrape out the wax, this is definitely not rubbish. It's an or not because it's recyclable. However, they are quite small, those aluminium tea light trays, aren't they? So you're gonna have to bundle it up with either some kitchen foil or collect them all together and smush them up into something the size of a tennis ball so that they'll be able to be properly sorted in the recycling process.

SPEAKER_00 42:29

Perfect. And a helpful way to get the wax out is to put them in the freezer for an hour or so, and then you can just push from the bottom and the wax should just fall out. And I mentioned a little bit earlier the directory, it's good for it to appear in our directory. If you're a new listener or if you've forgotten, on our website, so talkingrubbishpodcast.com, we've got a link that says directory. If you click that, you will see a list of everything we've discussed in every episode. So if you want to remember, I don't know, when we talked about Play-Doh as a rubbish or not, you can just go to the directory and it will tell you exactly where it is. Rubbish News. I came across a very interesting story about waste on Mount Everest, of which there is quite a lot: oxygen cylinders, tents, food wrappers, utensils, camping gear. And the basis of the story was a scheme that I think was set up in 2014 that has actually just been scrapped. And the scheme required climbers to pay a $4,000 deposit, which would they would get back if they brought back down from the mountain eight kilograms of waste. And and that's about eight bags of sugar, is it, James? That's helpful. Thank you, Robbie. It is being scrapped because it failed to deliver a tangible result alongside being an administrative burden. So, Robbie, let me ask you the question. If this scheme paid back most of the $4,000 deposits, which it did, nearly every climber who went up got their $4,000 back because they brought down eight kilograms of waste. Why is it being scrapped? Why is it not delivering a result?

SPEAKER_01 44:04

Is this anything more complicated than those very same climbers are taking up more rubbish than they're bringing back?

SPEAKER_00 44:12

Ding, ding, ding, ding. You solved it. The average climber going up Everest will create 12 kilograms of waste, and they are required to only bring back eight kilograms. So they are technically, on average, leaving four kilograms on the mountain, which means the waste is growing. I don't know what why didn't they make it bring back 15 kilos? Oh, yeah, that's a good point. Why not make it, you know, a bit like enough that you could carry it. It'd be quite heavy, 15 kilos, but you could carry that. And then at least everyone's bringing something back. The other issue is people were bringing the eight kilos back from the lower camps, not the higher camps, where the waste is a real issue. So because they didn't have a rule on like where the waste had to come from, it means that there's more collecting up at the top. And Mount Everest is actually covered in about 50 tons of waste. And the this deposit was meant to help fix it. Obviously, it hasn't. It's not fit for purpose. So they are looking to replace this scheme with a similar fee, so $4,000, that is non-refundable. And the difference is this will pay for mountain rangers who will make sure climbers bring back the rubbish. So they're going from a very, very expensive deposit return scheme to policing people bringing back their rubbish, basically.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

Okay, so the money's not paying the rangers to actually go up there and do the litter picking and the bringing it down themselves, like shuttling it back and forth. It's them standing over people saying, you need to take some more rubbish back, type thing.

SPEAKER_00 45:39

I think so. That's what I read, yeah. Um I think there might be a trash talk here. Extreme littering. What do you think? There must be like really good case studies of litter that has been found in very extreme places and how organizations go about solving it. I know when I go scuba diving, so often I will pick up, you know, fishing lines that got caught on rocks or something like that, and I'll be doing litter picking underwater.

SPEAKER_01 46:02

Yeah, well, the litter picking of Lego came up recently too, didn't it? So there's plenty of interesting stuff out there. So my news this week came from NewAtlas.com, a new publication to me, but it came up in my feed because of the kinds of news that I'm on the lookout for. And this is battery news that isn't about a fire in a recycling facility. Excellent. Finally, some good battery news. And I was hooked on this article when they drew parallels to lithium being the world's version of spice in the June movie series. I don't know whether you've seen that one, but pulled me into that fantasy world. And they were talking about the problem of black mass in lithium battery recycling. Black mass, that's not a heavy metal album. That's the powdery melange of stuff that's left over at the end of conventional recycling.

SPEAKER_00 47:02

First time melange has been mentioned on this podcast. If you have that on your bingo card, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

One of my favourites. One of my favorites.

SPEAKER_00 47:11

Is it I've never heard you say it. Ever. Melange. It's a cake, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 47:20

Don't eat black mass in cake form, please. Um, so usually what happens with this black mass is it's burnt or dissolved, which is uses you know, quite nasty chemicals. It's energy intensive, it's very expensive, it's quite difficult to get the usable lithium out of this black mass. But Rice University in Houston, which I had never heard of, as opposed to Melange, have found a new way, and it was really interesting what led to this discovery, because they were basically using a similar science to how the battery works in the first place. Someone was sat there thinking, in a normal charging cycle, the lithium is pulled out of the cathode, and that's what produces the power, but also what discharges the battery. So they decided why don't we use that exact same science, same idea, to pull the lithium out of the black mass itself. So what they do, and this quotes from the article, this uh Rice University put out a press statement that says, we recharge the cathode materials inside it, prompting the release of the lithium. By pairing this reaction with a simple process like splitting water, we can directly produce lithium hydroxide, a highly pure compound that can be used to make new batteries. The process only needs electricity, water, and the battery waste itself without the harsh chemicals. So this is really exciting for the spice of batteries and electric vehicles and the world that's going to be increasingly powered through long-term and short-term storage batteries, mostly using lithium, that we can pull more of this out of that black mass and get it recirculating into new batteries.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

Lots of positive feedback on Ellie's interview, which was episode 75. Thank you all for being so kind. Uh that's very nice, and we've enjoyed uh having people's feedback on that episode. Thank you. And I've passed it all on. Whilst we were discussing the interview, Ellie had a question she wanted to ask us in the interview. And I thought, actually, this is a rubbish question. That's not moving in. That's gone. I'm gonna run out of rubbish questions if we just start throwing them in the interviews. That's that's the spice of the Talking Rubbish podcast. So this follows our battery fire episode, which was episode 73, and Ellie asked me the question: so when a battery has died, can it still cause a battery fire? Or should we be less worried about it? Is it still dangerous?

SPEAKER_01 50:06

Oh, I mean, yes, it is, definitely, but I don't quite know why. It's still got stuff in it that can cause a fire. Is that technical enough?

SPEAKER_00 50:16

I think that'll do it. I think my slightly better better wording is this is because a battery, even though it won't power a device, is likely to still have some residual energy that could start a fire. So, yes, I think even though it's not working for us, it may have enough energy to spark up. And the Environmental Services Association, who we mentioned in the trash talk, actually had a campaign which had the tagline join the fight against zombie batteries, uh, which I don't think was specifically about it, wasn't like, oh, even though your battery's dead, it could come back to life like a zombie. But I do think for me personally, it's a really useful way to remember that the batteries can come back to life if we call them zombie batteries. Yeah, very clever. I remember that campaign. Yeah. So just as a reminder, this is if batteries are crushed or punctured, they can cause fires, and this will happen even if they are perceived to be dead by us. And so batteries need to go in recycling bins at supermarkets, or your local authority might collect them, but please make sure you check. Going back to social media, we had an interesting comment just yesterday, actually, saying this was from a user who said, Alkaline battery manufacturers encourage you to throw them away. And I thought, Do they? Alkaline batteries are AA, AAA, all our usual batteries. No, they definitely don't. So on the back of every battery or on every battery, it should have a crossed-out wheelie bin. And there is no alkaline battery manufacturer encouraging you to throw them in the bin. So I asked, you know, what makes you say that? And he did say, Oh, it looks like the advice has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. So this is why it's very important to stay up to date with your friendly weekly podcast.

SPEAKER_01 51:55

So, to confirm a crossed-out wheelie bin means don't put it into your wheelie bin.

SPEAKER_00 52:01

Exactly. And if you feel like you visited a recycling centre 20 years ago and you're still living off their advice, maybe check in with us first. Residual rubbish. This is something that has happened to us this week that has made us feel like an emoji. And my son recently got a present from a company called Would Like to Play, but it's W-O-O-D, Wood Like to Play. And this is uh when I went to their website, they explained it was a small family-run business. I think they're based in Staffordshire. Okay, so they make everything in the UK and they do wooden puzzles, wooden toys. And the toy that he was given came in a bag, like a tote cotton bag, and it had their details on the front of the bag. Now, my observation here is their website, so bear in mind they're called Wood Like to Play. Their website on the bag was printed WWOD like to play. So there was a typo. It wasn't their website. And then when I went to it, WWOD, you know, instead of would it was woed.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

Yeah. Double W instead of double O. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

It's really hard to say this early in the morning. Double W. And I checked, and that obviously wasn't their website, it was a typo. And I guess my observation here is that this happens so often, right? Companies order branding, and I very rarely see a company go, oh, we got that wrong. Let's send it anyway, because we don't want to waste the bags that we got printed. Now, one of two things have happened. They don't know they've got a typo, and I'm alerting them to it right now. Or the thing I think is more likely that they know they've got a typo, but they don't want to waste the bags they've had printed. And so I just wanted to shout them out as a they made me very happy in terms of emoji because they weren't wasting material. I guess there is a third option that I've somehow been given a fake, which could be true. Oh no, I hope it isn't. I don't know. Shame. I don't think I have. I think this is genuine. But I'm gonna have to get in contact with them and find out if they know about this and if they made an active decision to go, well, we don't want to waste all this fabric that we've just had printed. Because I do think that's uh very rare and a really good thing. So just promoting would like to play for making the right decision.

SPEAKER_01 54:11

Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. Well, let's confirm in an additional correction soon. And unfortunately, mine was a teardrop emoji, not a happy one, a crying one, not bawling my eyes out, but just a little bit sad. Um, because this week my residual rubbish is residual rubbish itself that I found, unfortunately, on a roadside. So I pulled up outside a popular walking spot, doing a bit more walking. Now we're into 2026, part of my new year's intentions, and beautiful walking spot, pulled up at a classic kind of lay-by parking spot, not a big kind of car park, but a little uh spot, and very, very neatly thrown, clearly thrown out of a car window of the previous person parked in that spot was a famous fast food brand's boxed meal. It's got a happy it was a happy-looking meal, yes. Um, so it was a famous fast food brands takeaway box and bag, but it was like sort of almost placed perfectly on the ground, not like tossed into a bush. It was like placed exactly out of the uh passenger window and had clearly been dropped, and also a vape box that had neatly fallen next to it, and it was all clean, you know, must have happened within that day or possibly the day before, but no longer, because otherwise it wouldn't have looked so kind of pristine. It's cold out there, and it I it just it was such a cliche of vape box and fast food thrown out of a car window at a beauty spot. Uh, I scooped it up, um, put it in the car, and and obviously went off and I I couldn't recycle it um because I didn't want to go in and and uh check out the bag. I did recycle the vape box uh because I didn't want to go and look in what was inside the bag. But yes, I was just left a little bit saddened, pull up at this beautiful spot. And we had a great walk, and there wasn't very much litter on the walk at all. But yeah, not a great start.

SPEAKER_00 56:26

I would love to know. We should do some research on this, whether um because you know sometimes you go to fast food restaurants now and in their car parks, they have bins, but the bins are like massive and they have a target on the back, so you throw and you try and hit the interview, yeah. Obviously, that doesn't improve recycling, but I'd love to know how much that decreases litter in those car parks. Because I reckon people love a game and they love it. Oh, I'll try and throw that in the bin. And we almost need that at these beauty spots, and it's sad that we need that, but it it's true, isn't it? You know, people just don't take the care. So well done on cleaning it up. And as always, thank you all for listening. Thank you all for litter picking, thank you for your reviews and engagement. We love getting the opportunity to do this podcast each week, and we will continue to do it for as long as people listen. 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 be found in our link tree. The details of all those things can be found in our show notes. Other than that, there's nothing left for me to say, then see you next binge. Bye. Bye.