Tracking Devices Reveal Where Recycling Really Goes

It's

really

difficult to coherently tell the story of what's happening with plastic. Watching the news and looking at all the media coverage, you would think that the debate over plastic waste has already been settled and won. But if you

really

look at the numbers, not only has the amount of plastic we are producing increased enormously, but it will increase significantly again in the next 10 years. We are producing more plastic than ever and it has to go some

where

, so it is very important to know what happens to this material once we are done using it. Tesco is a very large supermarket chain;

It is by far the largest in the United Kingdom. He makes huge profits every year. I noticed in my local Tesco supermarket that these white boxes appeared with a big sign saying: Recycle your soft plastics here, recycle your wrappers, your bags, your crisp packets, your bread bags. I wanted to find an electronic way to track this so I could be absolutely sure, because it's very difficult to track waste flows around the world. We just saw an unmarked red truck and we'll follow it for a while to see

where

it

goes

. I assumed that all the waste collected by Tesco would have a single result.

I would go to one place. They would either bury it or recycle it, but what I discovered was a much more complicated picture than that. It's very complicated, very complicated. There are good and bad. Hello, my name is Kit, I'm an investigative journalist for Bloomberg. Most people have no idea what happens to their waste once they put it in a container or trash can, and that's especially true for plastic. It just disappears. It is collected in a van or deposited at a

recycling

point and then enters this hidden ecosystem that very few people control. It

goes

to dirty, smelly places for someone else to sort through and take care of and you never think about it again.

But I was fascinated to know exactly what happens to him and exactly where these places are and where he's going. Tesco is betting heavily on reuse as one of its efforts to help prevent plastic pollution. And by this they mean that the plastic products they sell to consumers want to be able to recycle them and turn them into something equivalent. That's why they want to be able to reuse the bottles and containers they sell. I put three digital trackers in wrappers or bags and put them in Tesco boxes, which said they would be recycled. And then I had to wait a few days to see where they went.

And yes, they started moving three or four days after I left them and I could see them moving by truck. One of them went east of London and then disappeared on what looked like the banks of the Thames. It may have been lost, it may have become loose. I really don't know what happened to that. But the other two took a pretty clear path, which was to go to these Tesco fulfillment centers outside of London, and then they both headed to the same port, which is Harwich International. And from there they were silent for a few hours and the next time I saw them was when they were in Holland and heading east.

There are some types of plastic that are relatively easy to recycle and can be sold profitably on the open market. Things like clear plastic bottles are made from something called PET, and that's a good

recycling

material. You can reuse it over and over again. Clear plastic wrap, as long as it doesn't have a label, dyes or heat retardants, is a good recycling material. You can melt it and reprocess it. But as anyone who goes to the supermarket to buy food will know, almost none of the plastic products we sell are simply transparent packaging. They have labels on, they will normally come into contact with food.

And all that means is that not everything is the same. They are different grades of plastic. And you can't just put all that material together in a single load, and then melt it down and recycle it, what we would get if we did is unusable, terrible quality plastic. So what you have to do is separate it. And to this day, the only way to do that is for people to hand over it and feel the material with their fingers. Sometimes we burn it with a lighter to know what quality the plastic is and we separate it into different streams.

I had no idea that there is this incredibly expensive and time-consuming process to separate the different grades. They did not stay long in Holland. They went by very quickly and then took a German highway and traveled across the country in a period of 12 to 24 hours. They finally crossed the border into Poland and I could see that both digital trackers, although they happened on different days, ended up in exactly the same place. This is the Eurokey headquarters in Zielona Gora. Zielona Gora is a small town in western Poland. It is relatively close to the border with Germany.

So we knew we had to go and see where Tesco's waste was being sent and we knew exactly where it was going. So, I took a flight to Poland and joined my colleague Wojciech and we just got in the car and headed to Zielona Gora and stopped by to see the facilities. You can see lots and lots and lots of plastic. This is an exit door. What we found in Zielona Gora was a long industrial building, a warehouse. It had to be as long as a football field or more. There were hundreds of tons of material waiting to be shipped somewhere else.

Mountains of that. The reason the plastic goes there is because there is a British company called Eurokey. And Eurokey opened this large sorting facility on the outskirts of Zielona Gora. And that's where almost all the waste that goes through this supermarket system ends up. There are two main reasons why a lot of plastic waste is exported. The first is that getting rid of plastic in a developed economy like the UK, Germany or the US is expensive. If it has to be thrown into landfill, for example, if the plastic has to be buried because it can't be used, that costs, say, £100 per tonne in the UK, but the equivalent cost in Poland is significantly less.

Using a landfill in Poland could cost between £20 and £30 per tonne. But there are also many government incentives designed to make recycling a more attractive proposition. You get government credits for exporting material for recycling. So if your option is to export to Poland or recycle the material in the UK, the government provides you with both financial support to export and to do so domestically. I mean the most important exercise for the purposes of this project was to find out what happened to the bad plastic, because we know that some types of plastic are easy to use. You know, the problem the world has to face is what happens to bad plastic?

What about things that just aren't economical to reuse? So one of my digital trackers was inside a lentil puff wrapper, like a sandwich wrapper. And I really wanted to see where it was going. And I saw it on the move again, about 24 hours after it had been sorted at Zielona Gora, heading east across Poland to a small town called Poniatowa. And there I discovered that they had sent it to a company called Stella Pack. Stella Pack is an Eastern European bag manufacturer, they basically make garbage bags. Sort of black jackets and things like that. And they have a facility there that can turn soft plastic into soft plastic.

But they also have a way to get rid of the plastic they can't use, they have an incinerator on site. Which provides heat and power for your factory. Plastics are made from petroleum. They are essentially fossil fuels, so they burn very well. They burn similar to crude oil. That is why they are an excellent material to incinerate and obtain energy. And in Poland they have a huge cement industry. The cement industry requires a lot of heat and energy to calcify limestone dust and turn it into cement. They have these giant ovens that reach temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Celsius or 2,000 degrees Celsius.

And that has traditionally relied on Polish coal as a source of energy to heat the furnaces. But in recent years, the cement industry has discovered that all this waste material comes to Poland, that it is abundant and that it is very, very cheap. That is why it is now a widespread practice throughout Poland to burn plastic garbage and other types of garbage to obtain energy for the cement industry. It's actually better than free fuel because they get paid to consume it. If you are a cement manufacturer, waste brokers in Poland will pay you a small sum per ton to collect your plastic waste and incinerate it in their kiln.

So you are actually making money from your fuel source. This is a fantastic deal if you are in the cement manufacturing business. The tracker inside the Tesco plastic bag stopped pinging when he arrived in Zielona Gora after a few days. And I assumed it had been torn to pieces, destroyed, trampled, or taken. And then when I came back from Poland, I was surprised to see that its location had changed and said it was southern Turkey. A few hundred kilometers from the Syrian border, in an industrial estate. Not all plastic that reaches Turkey will end up being illegally dumped, buried or incinerated.

In Turkey there are good recycling companies that have a great reputation, but unfortunately Turkey, as a waste destination, has huge problems. And much of the plastic that reaches Turkey ends up being disposed of illegally. The tracker ended up in this industrial estate. A fairly remote species. There was no plastic recycling company nearby that we could identify, so we didn't understand why it was there. And we sent a journalist into the field to go out and visit this site. What he found outside a warehouse, abandoned in a large pile, was tons and tons of plastic waste from all over Europe.

The facility itself was not a recycling facility. They obviously left him there before they could move him somewhere else. I have no idea what happened to the

tracking

material that went to that industrial estate in Türkiye. I can't imagine it was possible to recycle it, but I don't know what happened after that. But we know that Tesco waste has been found in that same area for a long period of time. Just a few months ago, I spoke to an activist who found a Tesco bag, freshly abandoned on the side of a field, among a pile of smoldering burnt plastic.

It had obviously been dumped illegally. Tesco is a very large supermarket chain. It is by far the largest in the United Kingdom. You make a huge amount of profit every year. And it also has an incredible logistics infrastructure to ensure fresh bread, milk and meat is available in all its stores in the UK. It has a network. And if this entity can't properly dispose of plastic, what hope is there for a small, cash-strapped city council to want to dispose of our plastic at the curb? The reason Tesco exports plastic is because it is the most cost-effective solution to their problem.

So the reality is that, despite all the good words and good intentions, the vast majority of soft plastic that comes onto the market will be incinerated or buried.