Fighting against the PLA "can't be recycled argument"

One of the things people tend to forget is about recycling is, it works for some materials, like glass and aluminium. but plastic recycling is a bit more complex.

Plastics can be recycled, but depending on the materials used, they can only be recycled up to 10 times before the material becomes too structurally weak, so recycling plastic is just recycling a problem, or to put it another way, delaying the inevitable disposal in landfill or Energy from Waste incineration.

The UK Government (unlike more progressive countries like Ireland ) is very anti PLA (corn based plastics) , we know why this is as your Environmental Minister is no expert in polymers, so they rely on experts who feed them these same recurring arguments to muddy the water.

"PLA can't be recycled” and “PLA contaminates the waste stream” , sadly none of these are completely true ( there is at least merit in the contamination argument, more on this in a latter blog post).

Let's look at recycling PLA

So PLA can be recycled , although it does suffer the same problem of weakening each time you need to recycle it, so you have to keep adding virgin (new) material, but this doesn't take into consideration. that plant based plastics when they come to the end of useful life you can compost them to grow plants, which still means they are beneficial to the environment, sustainable and completely circular from harvesting to disposal.

I should add we would still prefer a system where they aren't recycled but composted so we can use them to replace peat based compost, so it's not the best option but it is certainly a much better option than recycling petrol based plastics.

Sources

Thanks to Total Corbion