Recycling may do more harm than good

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RECYCLING rubbish could be doing more harm to the environment than good or have no net benefit at all, research shows.

Whether it is better environmentally to recycle household items made of plastics or simply throw them away may depend on where you live, RMIT environmental engineering expert Tim Grant said.

“It varies from state to state, depending on the sorts of technologies and transports and yields that you get,” Mr Grant said.

“If you go over to Western Australia, they won’t have plastics recycling locally… the transport back to the eastern seaboard will outweigh any benefits from recovery.”

When it came to recycling consumer electronics such mobile phones, computers and TVs, “the net (benefit) of recycling them would be negative (for the environment), but throwing them away is equally damaging,” said Mr Grant said.

While most experts agree that recycling plastic bottles and glass jars does less damage than burning or putting them in a landfill, the recycling process has environmental costs.

David Moy from the Waste Management Association of Australia used the example of rinsing out a glass jar before placing it in a recycling bin.

“The approach I would take to that is to not use fresh water to rinse out, but put them on the sink and wash them at the end of your washing up.

“That gives you a clean product, without adding (that) environmental cost. But there’s also an environment cost with transport: using carbon fuels and building the vehicles.”

Dr Sami Kara, an expert on the total environmental impact of consumer products at the University of New South Wales, said working out if recycling a glass bottle was worth it was not a quick an easy task.

“There are so many unknowns in the scenario, it is almost impossible to answer your question (in less than a day),” Dr Kara said.

“These are issues related to type of product, collection networks, distance, volumes, recycling techniques, land fill cost, etc.

“They all play a critical role.”

Mr Grant said all those issues had to be taken into account.

“There’s water, waste avoidance, greenhouse gas emissions, photo-chemicals, smog… you can calculate if you are going to be better off by going to a recycling system,” Mr Grant said.

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They have this problem in the UK. They got to great lenghts to recycle glass bottles, then they are shipped of to South America to be recycled. Now the amount of fuel used to send these great ships full of items to be recycled is imense , so much so that it would have been ' greener' to put the stuff in landfill to start with.