Can we recycle our way out of the plastic crisis? – On the Green Fence

#plasticrecycling #environment #plasticpollution #chemical

Episode 5: Can we recycle our way out of the plastic crisis?

Globally only 9% of all plastic waste is recycled. The rest of it ends up in landfill, gets incinerated, or leaks into nature, with significant costs for the environment.

With plastic production growing each year, the pollution it creates is only set to get worse if we don’t change the way we deal with it once we’re done using it.

Recycling is seen as one way to get a handle on the situation. So why are recycling rates so low?

The main reason: It’s usually cheaper to make new plastic from scratch than it is to collect used plastic and recycle it into another product. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Interviewees featured in this episode:

Janine Korduan, senior program officer for circular economy with Friends of the Earth Germany 
Virginia Janssens, managing director of the trade federation Plastics Europe
Christian Schiller, co-founder and CEO of cirplus
Tamara Galloway, professor of ecotoxicology at the University of Exeter, UK

On the Green Fence is produced by DW studios in Bonn, Germany.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro
02:04 Germany, a recycling champion?
05:27 Recycling incentives and targets
08:13 China’s waste import ban
10:03 Mechanical recycling, the pros and cons
15:23 Chemical recycling, the pros and cons
22:21 Europe’s biggest recycling plant
25:11 Christian encounters a sea of plastic
26:54 Online marketplace for plastic waste
36:39 Why we need plastic

On the green Fence Green we made plastic in the first place so we should be able to keep the material in the loop design them in a way that they’re easy to be kept in the loop the real problem with plastic is not the material per se it’s how we deal

With the material after it’s been used and and I think that’s a solvable problem in times where we’re aiming to land on Mars we can’t recycle our way out of the plastic crisis this is also because in every step in every recycling uh Circle we do lose energy and material

We also need to look at the real solutions which are Reus and avoiding Waste I’m Neil King and you’re listening to on the green fence this is the fifth installment of our series about Plastics and in this episode we’ll be looking at recycling is it up to the task of stemming a plastic pollution crisis and What needs to change to keep Plastics in

The economy rather than in the Environment in Germany every house or apartment building usually has a line of different bins out the front now where I am there’s a green one for packaging um there’s a brown one for compost a black one for General household waste a blue one for paper and cardboard and uh yeah

And there’s also a dropof point uh for glass now separating the rubbish is a task that Germans take pretty seriously by the way it’s even a source of Pride to some people and there’s a reason for that Germans have a reputation internationally for being world champions when it comes to recycling in

A global study in 2017 Germany was ranked number one for recycling around 66% of its waste that is all waste though not just plastic but the reality after that rubbish is collected Isn’t So Rosy I was rather shocked to find out that even after we separate our plastic waste here

In Germany more than 50% of it is in fact burned official statistics say a little over 40% is recycles first of all Germany is a plastic production champion in Europe so one quarter of Europe’s plastic is actually produced in Germany so we’re looking at a really big and powerful chemical plastic sector that’s

Janine cardan a senior program officer for circular economy with Friends of the Earth Earth Germany and as you can probably tell Janine is not impressed by Germany’s supposed recycling prowess she says the current recycling rate isn’t something to be excited about that is more than the global 9% so that is good

But I wouldn’t call as a recycling champion because there’s still a lot to do we also need to look at other um points of the waste hierarchy which means avoiding waste and reuse and only the third step is the Recycling Plastics are made from fossil fuels they require energy money resources to produce in theory almost all Plastic Products could be recycled or turned into something new at the end of their life but in most cases this isn’t happening because the bulk of the plastic we use ends up in landfill gets

Incinerated or leaks into nature since the production of plant plastic took off in the 1950s there have been around 10 billion tons of It produced worldwide so more than one ton for every person alive on this Earth today and the amount of plastic is only growing around 430

Million tons is currently produced every year by some estimates that could triple by 2060 with significant costs for the environment if we don’t change the way we deal with it once we’re done using it recycling is seen as one way to get a handle on plastic pollution but as

Janine mentioned only 9% is recycled globally we already heard that Germany recycles a little over 40% of its plastic waste in the US only 5 to 6% is recycled according to Green Piece and in the UK it’s around 12% so why are recycling rates so low here’s the thing it’s usually

Cheaper to make new plastic from scratch from oil than it is to collect and sort used plastic and recycle it into another product the reason many Plastics are not recycled is that it often doesn’t make economic sense to do so some countries have imposed rules to try and curb

Plastic waste with taxes on Virgin Plastics or restrictions on single-use products for example the EU has banned common Plastics that routinely end up in the trash after one use like disposable Cutlery plates drinking straws and stirring sticks but Janine says there need to be more incentives to make Recycling and sustainable choices more

Attractive we don’t have taxes on Virgin Plastics and it is still too cheap and that’s why we do need political regulation to to make generally um like the extraction and the use of raw materials and also Plastics virgin Plastics more expensive to save them to

Not use them that is still a long way to go the EU is also trying to tackle the waste problem with recycling targets it wants to create a circular economy by 2050 with all Plastics being reused or recycled in a closed system under proposed rules at least 55% of all

Plastic packaging waste should be recycled by 2030 right now 38% of plastic packaging in the EU is recycled Germany is slightly above that at 45% and certain packagings such as drink bottles would need to contain a minimum of 30% recycled content by 2030 and 65% recycled content by

2040 let’s get the plastic industries take on these quotas because they’re going to require a shift from the way Plastics are designed to the way they are dealt with at the end of their life needless to say the Investments that need to take place in driving circularity and accelerating

Circularity um are huge um far-reaching reorganizations are happening of of the production uh the technology base the assets um to really speed up this this transition this is Virginia Janson she’s the managing director of the trade Association Plastics Europe that regulation could be really a GameChanger for incorporating recycled content in

Plastic packaging so we’re re really looking so at the same time we are investing in this space but also working with with our with the commission and and the co-legislators to make sure that the enabling frame framework and the legislative Target are there to create

That demand uh so um and when I say demand so these targets will really help us boost the market for those secondary raw materials if you like and and reduce at the same time the need for Virgin primary raw materials and reduce greenhouse gas emissions because needless to say you cannot decouple

Circularity also with the the low carbon objectives uh in this space uh but indeed those financing mechanisms as well need to be need to be put in place so that at least the value of plastics waste also increases and then achieving that circular Economy there’s another reason the EU is under pressure to find a solution to the waste problem for much of the past 20 years it had been exporting a large share of its plastic trash to China for recycling that was cheaper than disposing of it domestically the EU

Wasn’t the only one doing this China used to be the primary destination for much of the world’s plastic waste but it put a stop to that in 2018 in a bid to clean its environment complaining that contaminated materials were flooding Chinese facilities a side note that ban

Was the culmination of a major campaign by the Chinese government to crack down on poorly sorted waste from Western countries and it was called operation green fence no relation to the this podcast but I thought it was interesting mentioning that nonetheless anyway this led to a dramatic drop in plastic exports with

Countries like Germany and the US suddenly forced to find other ways to deal with their plastic waste the EU has also since tightened rules for exporting Plastics Germany now sends 5% of its plastic waste to other countries mostly to Malaysia the Netherlands Poland and turkey in 2021 it exported around 766

Th000 tons of plastic one quarter less than in 2020 it’s the third largest exporter of plastic waste behind the US and Japan the EU as a whole exports around 15% of its plastic waste controversially exported waste is usually counted as part of the recycling rate even though it may not always be

Recycled at the Destination when most people diligently sort their yogurt containers and peanut butter jars they’re probably not imagining this plastic waste being shipped overseas or being burned in an incineration plant but if all goes well and this plastic actually is recycled there are two possible ways of doing it mechanical Recycling and chemical Recycling mechanical recycling is by far the most popular almost all of the plastic waste in Germany that is recycled is processed this way while chemical recycling is still in the early stages of its Development so with mechanical recycling the plastic gets separated and washed its chemical composition doesn’t change but it gets ground down into pellets to be used for making new products so what are the downsides number one this whole process the sorting and the cleaning is expensive it’s generally cheaper to make new

Virgin plastic from scratch out of oil of course that can shift depending on the oil price so often there’s not a very strong economic incentive for collecting and sorting plastic waste and then recycling it this way number two plastic degrades each time it is recycled mechanically so

Products can only go through the cycle a certain number of times before ending up as waste that’s why pet water bottles for example are often down cycled and used for fibers in clothing or carpet and number three not all Plastics can be mechanically recycled it works great for simple easy to recycle plastic

Such as pet or for high density polyethylene HDPE which is commonly used in packaging but most other Plastics are problematic complex items like packaging with multiple layers mixed materials different colors or additives are a nightmare for mechanical recycling they’re simply unrecyclable it’s the same for tires and construction

Waste so these are some of the key problems behind our sluggish recycling rates what mechanical recycling has going for it though is that it has a lower carbon footprint than making virgin plastic from oil by some estimates it also emits 50% less greenhouse gas emissions per metric ton of plastic product than chemical

Recycling and 60% less than incinerating plastic for energy so it’s often the best option from an environmental perspective mechanical recycling could become more efficient in the future with better separation processes and Technology Janine from Friends of thee Germany says streamlining the design of plastic products to ensure they won’t be

Rejected by recycling plants could also make a huge difference we do have the problem of some packaging products that consist for example of seven layers of different plastic types and that cannot be recycled mechanically yeah we we need to ask the questions do we need packaging that consists of seven

Different uh layers of plastic Tes do we need packaging that that consists of composite materials so for example paper with plastic to make it look green and Echo we do see and understand that this is difficult but uh we still say that product design is the key and we can

Start doing this homework right now we can go to Mono materials we can stop producing packaging material that consists of seven different layers of plastic and paper it’s hard to do but it is possible I why is it why is it why is it hard to do joury perhaps if you why

Is that hard is it the marketing people that are calling the shots here that are saying they have to you know it has to jump out at you you have to be able to pick it off the shelf right away um or or why can’t we change this it’s

Definitely marketing uh and that’s why I always propose we should have standardized uh yeah re usable refillable packaging and then all the individual stickers for example could fulfill a bit the marketing part the second problems also that uh many products travel a long way so they are uh produced somewhere they are packaged

Somewhere and then the transport way is very long and this is also an argument that is used from industry that uh yeah ref aable packaging uh yeah needs to go back needs to be washed and then the ecobalance is becoming uh worse but from our point of view it is important to

Change the system so we can also produce a good further away transported with a standardized big container for example and then repackage it closer to the shops in Germany in standardized uh smaller reuse units put your super nice sticker on it uh sell it in the supermarket and bring back the packaging

But of course this would need a system change it is we would have a a new packaging system we would have also new owner structures who owns the package these are also very important questions that need to be uh addressed it is always simpler to to use a a single use

Plastic packaging that is then just burnt Afterwards now let’s take a look at chemical recycling as its name suggests this process uses different techniques to break down Plastics into their chemical building blocks all Plastics are polymers you can think of them as long chains made up of molecules called monomers there are quite a few chemical

Recycling options one example is depolymerization this involves using heat or chemical agents like solvents to break the bonds of a polymer and reduce it to its monomers those can then be used to create new plastic then there’s pyrolysis where the plastic waste is heated at high temperatures and

Converted into fuel that can then go into fresh polymers chemical recycling isn’t widely used yet but it has some significant advantages for starters it can process Plastics that mechanical recycling cannot tackle such as multi-layer food packaging mixed polymers or contaminated Plastics it has an essential role to play because in

Many cases it’s the only method available for recycling uh particular kinds of plastic waste and they can really reach via chemical recycling high quality level product Virginia from Plastics Europe says another plus is that this method creates plastic that is as good as virgin plastic So in theory

These Plastics could be recycled and infinite number of times this high quality means they can also be used for food grade or medical Plastics in cases where we need to really achieve high quality recyclers for whether it’s for safety or regulation or uh purposes or or sensitive applications which just simply

Cannot be met by mechanical Recycling and so that’s the the novelty of chemical recycling because you break it down into into oil again uh rather than recycled pallets right where you still might have some contamination for instance um um or some or some downgrading so I’m thinking of uh for

Certain food packagings Med medical devices Automotive components so that’s where chemical recycling comes into play and it really gives a second or third uh life to plastic waste streams which would otherwise also be incinerated or or landfilled right so it’s it’s that is also the benefit of course or illegally

Exported so in that sense we see a big role for chemical recycling but there are some downsides to chemical recycling like its mechanical counterpart chemical recycling isn’t seen as economically viable because it’s still cheaper to produce virgin plastic from fossil fuels than recycling with chemical processes this could change though one study from

Last year estimated that between 2019 and 2040 chemical recycling technologies will experience an average reduction in cost of 37.5% while virgin Plastics production was projected to increase in cost by over 70% due to Rising fossil fuel prices but this aside Virginia is convinced that scaling up chemical recycling is crucial for reaching the

Eu’s recycling targets our membership base has announced planned Investments for chemical recycling in Europe up to I believe it was 8 billion uh by 2030 but it’s important to say as well that we see this as a complementary uh recycling mechanism next to mechanic recycling is very

Important we need to accelerate quite a bit if we want to reach the 30% recycled content Target that’s for sure now is the time where we need the support of the EU policy makers to give that legal Clarity to the investors to our members uh to the companies who are investing in

Chemical recycling that this is recognized as a recycling technology and that this can also then used in the Recycled content targets as well and help to achieve Them chemical recycling has a smaller carbon footprint than producing virgin plastic from fossil fuels and burning it but it is still energy intensive breaking chemical bonds can require temperatures of over 400° C and it’s controversial because it’s also a process that hasn’t been widely tested with different quality Plastics on a

Large scale Janine says it’s a technology we should be cautious about there are different studies on chemical Recycling and they say that it has a very high energy demand one even states that paralyzes has a nine times higher energy demand than mechanical recycling so this is a problem because there will

Never be unlimited green energy also energy production relies on limited resources so we need to look at our energy use with chemical recycling we also have unwanted byproducts uh for example Coke in pyate izes and depending on the process it can even become a fluid and this needs a

Substantial effort actually to take care of that fluid burning for example is really bad for the climate so what we also know about chemical recycling is that we don’t know enough we don’t have enough independent data that does not come from industry we have many questions and many insecurities it’s

Important to mention that the greenhouse gas emissions can vary depending on the type and quality of the plastic waste the chemical methods used to break it down and the location as well as the Energy Mix Virginia from Plastics Europe says that despite its footprint chemical recycling still has a huge potential

Indeed there’s still the energy consumption of chemical recycling for instance but we would challenge that point and say okay guys but uh actually we prevent waste going to incineration or landfill where there is a bigger uh energy intensity as well so in that sense chemical recycling is a better

Option but mechanical recycling will have to be used if possible mechanical recycling is the goto recycling technology because also there the indeed the environmental footprint is is better today but we will just need some time space and a regulatory framework uh to get going to speed up to scale up and to

Get better in our in our Technologies as well if we link chemical recycling with our Net Zero Ambitions as well and and lowering CO2 two emissions there will also be an element then and that that might be towards 2030 where we actually use Renewables where we use hydrogen in

Our production in our energy uses where we use alternative energy sources and that will then also help decrease the energy intensity of the whole chemical recycling Process there are efforts underway to scale up this technology here in Germany the us-based Dow Chemical Company and the UK’s mura technology are building a chemical recycling plant in burlin near liik it’s scheduled to open in 2025 and is expected to be Europe’s biggest chemical recycling facility with a

Capacity of 120,000 tons a year but Janine from Friends of the earth says she’s worried plants like this will compete with mechanical recycling plants for feed stock because chemical recycling plants will also need V vast amounts of well sorted plastic waste to be economically viable she stresses this

Kind of recycling should be a last resort when we look at this specific plant we see it’s like a it’s a fossil fuel company chemical big companies that are actually planning announcing these plans and um what we are mainly worried about is the input of this plant so what

Is going to be used there as a feed stock and they announce that they want to use packaging materials and they will probably also like to have the well sorted single Plastics that should actually go into mechanical recycling so I guess there will be less well sorted

Uh plastic that um that is going to be mechanically recycled um and we are really scared that chemical recycling will take the clean and nicely sorted P PP P that should actually not go in there but stay in the mechanical recycle uh so for us this is really a threat to

A resource efficient and climate friendly circular Economy the UN says accelerating the market for Plastics recycling by making it a more stable and profitable Venture could cut plastic pollution by 20% in the next 20 years but for that to happen recycled materials need to be able to compete on a Level Playing Field with

Virgin materials and there needs to be enough plastic waste feed stock available and for that there first need to be good collection and sorting systems in place globally now that might sound obvious but it’s estimated that there are around 2 billion people currently not connected to any waste

Collection systems so that’s a really big challenge quotas such as the 30% recycled content Target the EU is proposing will likely drive up the demand for high quality recycled plastic and increase investment in recycling technology but the problem remains to make highquality recycled plastic you first need a decent supply of plastic

Waste it’s a world dream lifelong dream of mine to travel the world with a backpack for one year which is what I did and it was there 6 months into the journey between Colombia and Panama where I sailed from kataha to sunblast islands like a beautiful trip um like

Supposedly and it was on the second day on the open ocean where we literally got stuck in a massive carpet of algae and plastic waste Christian Chilla was halfway through his sabatical and it wasn’t the Caribbean Experience he’d been hoping for so the algae was forming so densely that it was keeping the

Plastic waste almost like a barrier and and we had to go through that was that was directly on our route right and it was spanning the Horizon maybe 30 m thick but and we had to go through it and this was the moment where I asked myself what on Earth are we Doing he’d had a busy few years after finishing his studies he’d dabbled in renewable energy Consulting interned at an oil and gas drilling company in Texas then spent several years expanding a successful startup in Germany but after his trip to Central and South America he knew what his next project would be I

Came back to Germany I with this thought on my mind let’s do something about plastic waste the most underused resource of this planet I would say to this day I do not understand how wasteful we are again how much money we spent on getting crude oil out of the

Ground refining it and then after a single use of a product it becomes so worthless that it ends up somewhere swimming in the Caribbean in the Pacific elsewhere you know this is just Epic Proportion wastefulness Christian is the CEO of surplus an online Marketplace for recycled plastic and plastic waste feed

Stock actually it has never been tried and done therefore done before to fully digitize the entire buying and selling process of plastic waste and recycled Plastics yeah that’s like we are really first and class here and this stems from the core inside now then that is that the core underlying fundamental problem

To solve in the plastic world is that we live in a world where virgin plastic new plastic is cheaper than high quality recycled Plastics and if you’re listener listening to this you have to let me repeat this because it’s so counterintuitive you would think it should be the other way around something

That’s recycled should be cheaper because it’s been used before than something that’s virgin right but this is not the world we live in in in in in Plastics and that if you forget everything else I’m telling you today if you walk away from that from the podcast you’ve learned some the fundamental

Reason why we’re living through the plastic waste crisis is because because this is the world it is therefore there’s nobody interested in buying recycled Plastics in the past therefore the waste is useless worthless therefore it creates all these problems of shipping it to the global South dumping it into the ocean because nobody

Sees a good business opportunity in it and this is what is about to change if we talk about the recycling process um I mean not all Plastics these days are recycled or it’s difficult especially with composite Plastics to try and you know separate them and get them to be

Recycled how how did you solve this problem that you sort of you know you can guarantee to your customers okay we we can assure that this has the quality that you need the importance for any business model I would say but especially for digital business models where you somewhat removing the personal

Interaction from one with one another it’s all based on trust right you could even argue any business transaction is grounded in trust and recycling has traditionally been always seen as a very untrust for the material stream because you’re dealing with a very complex mixed waste chain and almost every recycling

Is unique yeah so and think of it again in this nightmare scenario now you are the proor and gamble uni Lev Bier St name and you’re charged with buying 20,000 tons of plastic to make sure your packaging always looks the same anywhere in the world right at any and doesn’t

Break on the way to the customer and now you’re faced with a supply chain where the recyclers are essentially tell you yeah well I’m producing the qualities I can because I have only access to this waste I it’s a nightmare and there was no standard available in the market

Simply because also nobody was asking in higher end applications for recycled plastic now that has changed you already described it’s now hard even to get recycled plastic because demand is coming now we are in this nent market stage where demand is forcefully pushing into the market and now they realizing

Oh it’s actually not available in the quality and quantity that we need and that is essentially the Insight why we decided to build the standard because now we’re talking professional buyers are asking real serious amount of recycled Plastics and now they need to almost educate professionalize the

Suppliers to say we need to now become commodity business no longer this flower pot recycling or let’s say down cycling no you need to now be able to step up the game to be able to be a part of a new packaging or to become even a car

Part or even an airline part in the future yeah um and this is something that has complete lack of standards and with a lack of Standards no profession professionalization and therefore also no real availability to finally like get that market off the ground and that’s why we we were actually approached by

The dean the German Institute of norms they asked us wouldn’t standardization play a real huge role for you to create trust in you as a software and I agree um that’s why we invested the money and the time and 16 players from the value chain came to join us to build this

Standard to actually put the first of its kind the only actually I could say today really proud the only available standard worldwide for high quality recycling plastic is the one standard we’ve built and it’s also been now accepted by the European commission as the the part of the a key of standards

Of the future of circular plastic so really big step for us without this you could argue uh you can try whatever you want with digitization but without standardizing the materials and the data around the materials you will never be able to kick such a business model the

Ground mhm mhm just a reminder for our listeners it’s not you’re not a recycling company you bring recyclers and plastic producers together right you you solicit the volumes of recycled plastic from both ends right it’s a software yeah a digital platform that you offer right correct um can you

Perhaps explain then um for our listeners um I mean what kind of plastic waste and recyclers are tradable with your software is there is is it everything or are there limits well technically you can put any type of plastic on the platform today yeah um and any type of waste you know

The question is will you find a buyer yeah because um obviously the less specified the more chaotic your waste offering is or your recycled plastic offering it’s very unlikely that you will find a buyer right but um yes technically we even have customers as far away from New Zealand and we’re are

German Germany based company but we have yeah suppliers from New Zealand from Nigeria from China and this is all out of mouth because we don’t do any marketing in there but it’s just because it’s a global market plastic is everywhere plastic waste is everywhere so essentially anybody who has access to

The internet and has at least a basic understanding of recycling and is a professional company so we’re not for individuals we’re only for companies can today join Surplus and put their offering on the platform and how are the companies responding to your business how is um I mean how is it developing

The demand the growth have you got perhaps some percentage figures for 2022 or is that secret yeah um mostly a secret but I can sh I can share a few things so um today we are like basically three and a half years in after we launched our first prototype and we have

More than 2,500 companies registered on the platform we have um aggregated data on more than 2 million tons of plastic and plastic waste on the platform that has been ever been listed on the platform we are as a digital intermediary between the seller and the buyer always also a a subject to

Fluctuations in the market so what I can tell you since October last year we see numbers going down actually simply because theand for recycled Plastics has significantly been been reduced um the only thing that on that counters that somewhat is that at least in Europe we see the packaging and packaging waste

Regulation um that once it enters into force it describes minimum recycled content that plastic packaging in Europe will have to fulfill by 2030 and 2040 these are highly ambitious targets the United States also some states are moving in a similar Direction but there’s no federal law yet if the market

Is so dysfunctional that virgin is cheaper you can of course try to make virgin more expensive or you can just also say to get that recycled plastic Market off the ground say you have to sell products with a certain minimum recycled contem so you have the safety

As an investor as a supplier that you will find a buyer of your material therefore you get that economies of scale going in a market that is really woful underserved today so like a quota that everybody has to meet and then uh automatically the demand for recycled

Plastic will always be there to a certain degree at least even if it’s expensive I mean where do you see the biggest growth opportunities right now um in terms of region or also in terms of you know particular plastic grade that has perhaps been neglected with recycling geographically it’s Europe and

India and simply because uh India actually has already put very is ahead of Europe in terms of regulation actually but India is already as of 2026 if I’m not mistaken has minimum recycled content quote and all types of packaging brought to the Indian market and as you

Know this is a big market so India I think is going to see the strongest growth in recycled Plastics and Then followed by the the European Union and the UK United States not so much because regulation is not as forceful but this informs of geographies and in terms of

Type of material I’d see the strongest growth in the so-called polyol market and this is poly propylene and polyethylene by volume by far the largest Plastics used worldwide mostly in packaging um and also by far the least and hardest to recycle at this point uh because it’s very cheap it’s

Super cheap and in the past then therefore nobody recycled it um the real big Challenge and also the biggest growth opportunity I see in polyethylene polypropylene if you find an way way to get the material back safely traceable to the to the recycler and then have the

Products designed in a way that they are easier to recycle and then have the recycling technology step up so that they can actually produce first let’s say for the nonf food care grade packaging Market let’s say Cosmetics detergent grades and also for the home appliance industries I would say these

Are the two markets I see are the most likely to pick up a significant amount of recycled Plastics in the shorter time frame I mean how do you feel about Plastics um today because it’s a material I mean it’s it’s being vilified a lot especially by environmentalists

But at the same time it’s super super useful and and um also in certain regions of the globe it’s it’s absolutely necessary um for for a lot of reasons how do you feel about plastics it’s funny that you asked me that question because everybody who joined

Surplus as a team member I asked them that on a scale from one to 10 um because yeah I have a very ambivalent uh relationship like like you describe it it’s it’s you cannot argue that plastic is not useful yeah I mean like you said I think we couldn’t have this phone call

You couldn’t have this podcast we would we would probably not not be wearing our clothes today CU everything somewhat contains plastic the Modern Life would not be possible nor would it be to really combat climate change if we were to vilify plastic and say out with plastic you know and you know the

Question you must ask anybody who’s criticizing this is also what’s the alternative are we going to package everything in aluminum now or in paper and the the ecobalance of these materials are not necessarily much greater the real problem with plastic is not the material per se it’s how we deal

With the material after it’s been used and and I think that’s a solvable problem in times where we’re aiming to land on Mars I think it’s a very human-made problem we made plastic in the first place so we should be able to keep the material in the loop design

Them in a way that they’re easy to be kept in the loop and then you know you also reduce that harmful element that arguably is and I I give that to anybody out there is the biggest issue around plastic it’s it’s causing massive damage there’s no doubt about it’s even in our

Bodies but purely because we can’t keep it in the technical Loop so I always say to your listeners and anybody out there don’t be a plastic hater but be a hater of plastic in the environment yeah um as long as we do not have an alternative and I’m all for Alternatives as well

Because the growth trajectory of plastics is just quite frankly scary just one data point for your listeners by 2050 we will produce between three to four times as much Plastics as we’re producing today yeah and we haven’t closed the leakage into the environment but there just a scary data point at the

End here on the positive thing I’m very optimistic in saying if we really get our act together as humans and say all right let’s stop it let’s stop this influx we can control the material we can design it in a way we have everything out at our hands available if

We just mean it then we’re able to close the loop and therefore eradicate that negative aspect about Plastics Christian Chilla co-founder of surplus thank you very much for your time and joining me here with on the green feds my pleasure in you And that brings us to the end of this episode and if I were to sum it up we need recycling Technologies to be able to wean the Plastic industry of fossil fuels but for the recycling system to work it needs investment and better plastic design but it’s not the Only

Solution there will be a need to cut down on single-use packaging and plastic that is toxic to the environment as consumers we can also avoid unnecessary plastic and reuse plastic where possible but finally I do want to stress though that as much as we as consumers are contributing to this

Deluge of plastic waste it is in fact just a handful of companies who are firmly keeping us on this plastic drip and could change the entire plastic narrative tomorrow if they wanted to something that the acclaimed marine scientist and ecotoxicologist Tamara Galloway underlined when I spoke to her

For our episode on microplastics we can’t afford not to do things differently and ultimately the way to solve the problem is to follow the money so ultimately we have to persuade those big companies the the three biggest companies who are responsible for most of the plastic production and their

Sponsors the people who fund those companies to think about doing things differently we do a lot of work in the galapagus: And that in fact brings us to the end of this series on Plastics but before I leave you I just wanted to point out one more thing that became very clear while working on this series and that was just how complicated the global web of plastic is just trying to track down

Certain statistics for recycling or emissions or cost or production were very tricky and often there were conflicting findings and information but we’ve tried to distill the research we did in the most accurate way possible and also hopefully in a way that has been interesting and entertaining as

Well now if you have any feedback or questions on the series please do drop us a line or a voice message to on theeg greenfence dw.com now we will be taking a longish summer break and a bit of a creative pause for now but uh in the

Meantime you can always listen back to all our episodes wherever you get your podcasts many thanks to my sound engineer zad Abu slamon and my colleague and producer Natalie Mueller and a big thanks to all our listeners for your interest your patience your valuable input and your very kind feedback and uh

If you’re at a loose end today and haven’t done so yet why not take a few minutes to write a short and sweet review on Apple podcasts that would certainly make our day that’s it from me for now my name is Neil king take it easy and take Care I’m the green fence