What really happens to your waste after you’ve sorted it and dutifully put it in your local recycling container? The Czech Environment Ministry attempted to find out via a unique experiment – at least for one very specific type of rubbish. They put tracking devices on 100 PET bottles and put them in recycling bins in locations all around the country to see where they ended up after three months – and the results were surprising.
My partner and I are keen waste sorters and pride ourselves on hardly ever having to take out our mixed waste because there is so little of it. We compost our organic waste and dutifully sort everything else into paper, plastic, glass and metal.
But plastic waste still makes up the biggest proportion of our sorted rubbish, despite our efforts to reduce it. And so every time we take our plastic recycling to our nearest yellow container in Prague, we wonder, ‘Will this actually get recycled?’
See the rest here.
Author: Anna Fodor