Shipping plastic bottles creates less CO2 than landfilling
A new Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP)
study released in August 2008 has found that selling
the UK’s used plastic bottles and paper for recycling
in China actually saves carbon emissions. Shipping
these materials more than 10,000 miles produces
less CO2 than sending them to landfill at home and
using brand new materials.
The transport issue is just one factor in assessing
the environmental impact of exporting materials
for recycling. However, it has become increasingly
important to understand, as over the last ten years
exports of used paper have risen from approximately
470,000 tons to 4.7 million tons. Exports of used
plastic bottles have gone from less than 40,000
tons to half a million tons over the same period.
This increase reflects the huge rise in household
recycling in the UK from 7 percent to over 30 percent
during that time.
The UK collects more paper than it can recycle and
there is strong demand from growing economies, such
as China, where there are not enough trees for paper.
Plastic bottles are also much in demand from China’s
manufacturing industry and there is currently insufficient
capacity in the UK to reprocess them here.
This study shows it is environmentally less harmful
to send that material to China for reprocessing
than sending it to landfill in the UK.
This study sought to answer the specific question
of whether the CO2 emissions from the transport
outweighed the benefits of the recycling. It quantifies
the CO2 emissions from transporting one ton of recovered
mixed paper or recovered plastic (PET/HDPE) bottles
to China. It assumes that the carbon savings of
recycling in China are similar to those identified
in other countries, including the UK.
The study showed that the emissions caused by transporting
the material to China account for only a small amount
– on average less than a third – of the CO2 saved
by recycling. However, due to the imbalance of trade
between China and the UK, the majority of container
ships head back to China empty and they are producing
CO2 emissions whether or not they are carrying cargo.
If you take this into account, the transport emissions
are even smaller - less than one-tenth of the overall
amount of CO2 saved by recycling.
This study is not a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), although
it forms a necessary part of the evidence base to
demonstrate that exporting the material to China
is environmentally sustainable. To answer this question
in full, further work on the relative environmental
impacts of recycling processes in China and the
UK would be required.