Manufacturers have long claimed that it's not really possible to make packaging out of recycled plastic, because the plastic quality degrades with every recycling step.
Now the EU is starting to require many types of plastic packaging to contain at least 30% recycled plastic, and what do you know, suddenly manufacturers are all switching their plastic choices from eg. LDPE to PET, because PET is more recyclable. In some cases with 100% recycled plastic.
Turns out it was possible all along.
Relatedly: pay attention to which brands have *exactly* 30% recycled plastic content... they're the ones that are trying to do the absolute bare minimum they are required to.
@joepie91 is there anything in that EU mandate about where to actually recycle anything that isn't a food product that comes in plastic? I have been buying liquid laundry soap at Action because its cheap and comes in a very large container that lasts a while, but then I have a giant plastic container that I don't know how to recycle and it makes me feel bad. I know grocery stores have to accept their food plastic, aluminium, and glas bottles and cans back, but what about everything else?
Follow up, do you trust the municipality to actually recycle things like that laundry soap container or even milk cartons that they say to just throw in the regular trash? How is the Netherlands track record on recycling outside of drink containers?
@domo There's nothing on an EU level that mandates specific collection/recycling practices AFAIK, but the standard intake requirements for separate plastic waste collection in the Netherlands (which most municipalities seem to follow) do actually include empty detergent containers in the recyclable plastics category (even for stuff like bleach).
How much of that actually gets recycled is anyone's guess. It seems that the actual recycling rate *is* growing as more recycling facilities are being built within the EU, and exports of plastic are increasingly being banned, but I wouldn't be able to name a (credible) percentage, due to the wildly different ways these are calculated in different places.
Some municipalities claim to do post-collection sorting rather than separate collection, but I'm skeptical about the accuracy rate of that. Automatically sorting such a wide variety of trash is very error-prone, and doing it manually seems unrealistically labour-intensive to me.
@joepie91 yeah, that makes sense and I agree with you on being skeptical about the accuracy rate of post-collection sorting. Amsterdam doesn't seem to be doing individual bins to put plastics, at least not in my neighborhood :(
I couldn't find any within 1km of my apartment either.
I was using this site, but if you know a better one, I can try that one.
https://kaart.amsterdam.nl/afvalcontainers#52.2782/5.0683/52.4311/4.7288/brt/12492//
I know you're not like the authority on any of this, but you're the only nederlander I follow that ever talks about plastic waste (for which I'm grateful). It's such a problem here though and I like following up on if/when it will improve.
@domo AFAIK it's entirely the responsibility of the municipality to determine the collection policy, and to communicate how it works, so I wouldn't expect a better source to exist than the municipality's own site, unfortunately.
It's plausible that there's only separate collection in parts of Amsterdam due to the difficulty of retrofitting extra collection infrastructure into existing neighbourhoods, I vaguely recall that being brought up as a rationale for post-collection sorting at one point. Though for newer neighbourhoods I *would* expect separate collection, and if there isn't, that's probably a good reason to complain at the municipality...
And like, this is not some obscure change. This is happening *all over the place*. If you are in the EU, and you have eg. some cosmetics or soap for which you have both a recently purchased bottle and also one that's a few years old... compare them.
Chances are you're going to find one of them being LDPE or HDPE, and the other being PET. Regardless of what brand or store it came from. Regardless of price point.
Similar deal with LDPE/HDPE getting swapped over to PP for foil packaging (laundry powder bags, wet wipe packs, that sort of stuff). If you've noticed the plastic getting a bit more 'crispy' and a bit less flexible at some point, this is why.