Saucy

It’s the dregs of the last of the squeezy bottle of tomato ketchup this week. Mr Harrison threw it in the recycling bin the other day, not realising I wanted to take a picture and work out what the plastic type was. Like a bad CSI agent, I went rummaging in the bins with a torch and managed to unearth the bottle but sadly not the cap (we try and unscrew these to make sure the plastics are separated).

Not much room on the bottle for recycling labels, other than these two:

So the green and white arrows means the bottle can be recycled, right? Or it’s made from recycled materials, right? Um, no. This is ominously called “The Green Dot”, of which the Recycle Now website gives the following explanation:

The Green Dot does not necessarily mean that the packaging is recyclable, will be recycled or has been recycled. It is a symbol used on packaging in some European countries and signifies that the producer has made a financial contribution towards the recovery and recycling of packaging in Europe.

So, if I’m super happy that the producer is happy to part cash for someone else to sort out recovery and packaging of waste via a national packaging recovery company, then great. But it doesn’t help me make a choice about the product in my hand.

If you’re interested in the MK label, by the way, I think it indicates the ketchup is Kosher.

Recycling the bottle

I found a really pretty 2011 Bachelor Thesis from the Netherlands on the recyclability of Heinz packaging. Whipping through this, there were essentially three types of plastic.

• Clear plastic bottle (PET)

• White plastic cap (PP)

• Clear plastic “valve” – silicone, which actually isn’t a plastic (huzzah!) – or is it…?

Reading further through this thesis, there is some really good info on how PET gets recycled, which, it turns out, takes a fair bit of effort. Plastic waste gets sorted into the different waste types via a Near Infra Red machine – a clever machine that shines infrared light at plastics and is able to tell what types they are from how the light is reflected back. Once all the PET is picked up, it’s then washed, shredded and the flakes separated again to tease out other plastics that might have wound up in the mix. It’s then ready to go to manufacturers.

There’s a good little video, if you’ve got five minutes on the Biffa (chaps who are contracted by our council to pick up our recycling) website that shows some of the machines and how the whole process works out.

However, it’s not all good news. Testing of the bottles in the thesis showed that if there was still enough ketchup residue in the bottle, the machine would have a problem recognising the PET and the bottle would be ditched. Could be sorted by washing the bottle before it went in the bin, but not everyone is going to do this. Another problem that cropped up was that due to an extra barrier within the bottle, this caused the PET to discolour when heated, which again caused it to be rejected. The silicone value caused a number of issues, and to top it off even the paper labels contaminated the washing water used to clean the flakes because they got pulped. Obviously, some of the PET and PP would have been recycled, but not as efficiently as we would like.

Back to glass?

Both the plastic used in sauce bottles (PET and PP) and glass get recycled by our council, so which is the best option for our condiments?

First off, what’s the likelihood of either being recycled? Based on 2016 packaging wastes stats, we know that 67% of glass was recycled, while plastic (sadly can’t find anything that breaks this down in to types) is only 45%. Glass can also be continually recycled for the same purpose (jars being used to make jars), while there is a limit to how many times plastic can be recycled. 2 points for glass.

Of the stuff that does that recycled, there’s going to be a bit of journey to the recycling plant. Helpfully, the Oxfordshire Recycling website tells me where all my recycling ends up.

PET heads off 156 miles to Lincolnshire, while the PP heads off either 78 miles to Kent or 61 miles to Bedfordshire. I’m going to be generous and assume that the PET is going to be recycled onsite but not sure I can give PP the same treatment. It may be part of the 59% of plastic recycling that was exported between Oct 2018 and Dec 2018, most likely China.

Glass either winds up 71 miles away in Coventry or 45 miles away in Brentford. There is also an export of glass of 29% but for the life of me I can’t find out where it goes – it could be France, it could be China for all we know. It could be it has a shorter journey than plastic, especially if it’s not heading to China, but we need to remember that is heavier than plastic so, although the journey time is less, the carbon emission is going to be more. First point (begrudgingly) to plastic. Speaking of which…

I’ve been scratching my head on carbon emissions as there isn’t that much comparable data out there. There was a study in 2002 about York, which has the following numbers:

• PET drink bottles: 6.75 kg CO2e per kilogram of PET

• Glass Not recycled: 8.4 kg Co2e per kilogram of glass

• Glass Recycled: 1.4 kg Co2e per kilogram of glass

At face value, PET seems to be better, but then the good news is that a lot of products in the UK are already using recycled glass. For example, green wine bottles use on average 68% recycled materials. This means we could say that the carbon foot print of recycled glass is better than PET. Third point to glass.

Of the stuff that doesn’t get recycled or even reused, it’s most likely going to end up in a landfill. Glass doesn’t degrade so won’t result in green house gasses or other chemicals as it breaks down, so is pretty much inert – it is made of sand after all. Plastic on the other hand, though it’s going to take a jolly long time to breakdown, 1000 years at an outside guess, will break down into other compounds depending on the plastic type, which may or may not be particularly helpful in the environment in the future. After all, can we guarantee that an engineered landfill is still going to be fully sealing waste in a thousand years’ time? Final point to glass.

Plastic 1 – Glass 4

Back to ketchup

Now, the good thing about Heinz ketchup is that they do give you a choice of either plastic or glass, and obviously I bought a glass bottle – and here it is in all its tomatoey glory!