STEM Showcase - Meet our researchers Waste Management, Recycling and Plastics
KAREN FOLEY: Welcome back to the Student Hub Live STEM Showcase. We are talking about waste management, recycling, and plastics in the session. And I am joined by Toni Gladding and Carl Boardman. Now, you both do really, really interesting things. I'm going to tell everyone what you do. Toni, you're a senior lecturer in environmental engineering. And you carry out research in air quality of downwind biological waste management treatment facilities. But you're talking more generally here about waste management and recycling of various materials.
And Carl, I love the sound of some of the things you're doing. It's so topical right now. You're a lecturer in engineering and environmental sciences. And you've just done a research project looking at the biodegradability of various plastics including fossil fuel derived plastics and bio alternatives. So that's really interesting. Because plastics in the environment is so topical right now. I think after Blue Planet we all were absolutely horrified. But it's a continuing issue. And so I'm very interested to see what your research is all about. And you bought some plastic today.
TONI GLADDING: We have. I think the important thing to remember about plastic is it's necessary. Single use plastics are pretty much all of our food packaging. So it's not like we can suddenly decide we're not using plastics overnight. It's a very cheap way of getting your food to you freshly. So it's one of the things we can't do without. Having said that, there are perhaps some changes that could be made.
KAREN FOLEY: But we didn't have them a long time ago.
TONI GLADDING: We didn't. But we had things like paper and card, which basically cost a lot more money to produce, aren't as hardy, and all the rest of it. So unfortunately, plastics are probably here to stay. The issue is dealing with them once we're finished using them.
KAREN FOLEY: So it's this increasing tradeoff, I guess, as we get more technologically advanced, the world population gets bigger, there are more mouths to feed. Producing and transporting food and products, et cetera, becomes more meaningful. And so plastics are a key part of that.
TONI GLADDING: Yeah, well, we've got a growing population. We've got a growing food production. In the UK alone, we use something like 13 billion plastic bottles every year, something like eight billion straws. We're talking a lot of plastic waste basically.
KAREN FOLEY: And a while ago-- I can't remember how long actually. It probably shows my age-- we became increasingly aware-- you've got some of the recycling bags. And I live in West Wales. And we have a very good recycling facility in my area. Over the road, not so good. So things are very varied.
And one of the questions we've asked our audience is how much they think they pay for waste management in their council tax. And also we've asked you at home how long you think a plastic bottle lasts in the ocean. So do select those items, just click on the widget that you want to reply to, which is the Interactive Voting tool. Select the option you think is best. And then you'll see what everyone else has said as well.
TONI GLADDING: So yeah, I mean, if we talk about the UK first, then we can go on and reflect a bit further around the world. In the UK alone, we produce around 200 million tonnes of waste per annum. That's a lot of tonnage.
KAREN FOLEY: What does that look like? That sounds so nebulous.
TONI GLADDING: It's huge, basically. When you think there are something like 400 facilities dealing with it, it's almost unimaginable. It's very difficult to visualise. But if we were talking about the plastics component-- well, there's two components that might be of interest actually. Of that 200 million tonnes, only 27 million tonnes is household waste.
KAREN FOLEY: Nice.
TONI GLADDING: So the rest is construction, industrial, mineral, dredging, all that kind of thing. So household waste is actually quite a small percentage of the overall waste production. And of that 27 million tonnes, about 0.5% is plastic. There's all sorts of packaging. Because we've got to remember there's glass, and cardboard, and paper. They're all types of packaging. But plastics is around 0.5%.
So all in all, about a million tonnes per annum from the UK. There's something like eight million tonnes per annum that's actually exhausted into the oceans around the world. So the UK is actually a developed country. We have a very good waste management system. We recycle about 44% of our plastics. But there are problems with recycling, which is why we've brought them some examples today.
KAREN FOLEY: Do want to see what people said at home about how much they think they pay for their waste management in their council tax?
TONI GLADDING: Sure.
KAREN FOLEY: Right, let's take a look at what you said. So here we've got 44% in the lead with 25%. No one has thought 50%. 33% said 10%. And 22% at 1%.
TONI GLADDING: Yeah, so nationally, the correct figure is around 10%. So only 10% of your council tax actually deals with everything from your waste collection, to taking it to a facility, to the treatment, to removal of any waste to landfill, everything. It covers absolutely everything.
KAREN FOLEY: And the interesting thing here is that people thought it was 100% more than it actually is. And I guess that's part of the question about, well, what is council tax for anyway? And a large part of what we see is waste collection, in terms of being an average consumer. Why is that question important?
TONI GLADDING: It's important because I think people think that-- well, there's a lot of publicity around weekly collection of waste. And people think, "I've paid for this in my council tax." But they don't realise that actually only a very small proportion of their council tax covers that.
And if we move to things like fortnightly collection, which is a little controversial and a lot of people don't like it, it's actually been proven that it's the only way we can actually raise our recycling rates. Because basically, then people do recycle, if they have a less frequent waste collection.
KAREN FOLEY: You know we had a change in our recycling where I live. And they have a fortnightly black bin collection, which is all your sort of non-recyclable waste. And I know from my own perspective I hardly ever use that, whereas I know I used to use it a lot before. I'd say it's had a massive change. Because I know I can get things more quickly.
TONI GLADDING: It does change your behaviour.
KAREN FOLEY: If I just wash them out, I can recycle my plastics. And I think we're more aware of them. So are changes like that really impacting on behaviour?
TONI GLADDING: Absolutely. I mean, it's pretty clear from all the stats that, when a local authority moves to a fortnightly or less frequent residual waste collection, that their recycling rates rise.
KAREN FOLEY: Now, we all care about the environment. And I think that some of the people are very mindful of it. So many people often think, "Well, there's nothing I can do to change the situation of the world." But actually, waste management is one thing that you can have a very real impact on. So why might people not be agreeing with that whole idea then?
CARL BOARDMAN: Well, I mean, it's not necessarily that they might not agree. Different councils operate different systems. And so in Wales, they have more of a unitary approach to it, hence we see higher recycling rates. But across England, for instance, you have different councils operating different schemes.
So it's actually, genuinely quite confusing. So people that want to opt into these systems and participate are finding it really quite hard struggling with all the bins that they have to put their stuff in. So there is that. There are people that want to but can't. Other than, that I guess if it's easy just to throw it away and there are no penalties as such, then you might find a few people that want to do that.
KAREN FOLEY: When I lived in New Zealand, which was a long time ago, they had already started to limit how many bins you were allowed to put out. And there was that whole idea of penalties also. The plastic going to the ocean is a really topical issue. And Toni, you mentioned that there was a huge amount that was being pumped into the ocean. What can we do about that?
TONI GLADDING: I think this is more Carl's area.
CARL BOARDMAN: Should I take that one? So yeah, well, I suppose we could start with sources really. Plastics come from many, many different sources. It's not just the bottles that we see here, for instance. That's part of it. They're the big things that we can see, and we visualise, and we see them floating on the surfaces. But really, the plastic in the ocean, what we're really talking about, is tiny, tiny, tiny small bits of plastic that you can only really see under a microscope.
And they come from the things like washing your clothes. They could be fibres, for instance, synthetic fibres. They can come from your tyres of your car, the rubber compounds breaking down, breaking off into the rivers, and the gullies, and channels, and washing into the oceans. And they can also come from industry processes that use palletized forms of plastic and that get washed out into the effluents. Because it's very uncommon, for instance, for companies to really filter down their effluents down to the macro and nano scale. A thousandth of millimetre scale is what we might be talking about here, as well in terms of some of the plastics.
So they come from all manner of sources. But I think, as Toni said earlier as well, that the major source of plastic in the oceans isn't really-- it's the developing world, so where they don't actually have some of the waste treatment facilities to put their recyclable content into. So it's not that they don't want to recycle. It's that they don't have the capability to actually do that. And so you see lots of rivers that are clogged up and choked with plastics which are flowing out into the oceans.
So yeah, they come from all manner of places. In terms of potentially what do you do about it, it's a tricky one. I mean, we all live in a world where we're consumers. So there is always a penalty for being a consumer. Whether that be in terms of energy or the associated emissions from processes, there is always going to be a cost.
So we can change our behaviour individually. So we can try and limit the amount of production of certain types of materials that we deem to be more impactful on the environment. So we can limit buying those. We can look at technological innovations. We can look at maybe shifting from fossil fuel derived polymers and plastics more towards naturally occurring plastics, bioplastics, things that might include things like starch and lignin which break down naturally in the environment.
We can look to policy. We can really look to ban microbeads and plastics, which we've done in the UK recently. So there are many things you can do across a whole spectrum from an individual all the way up to corporate, social responsibility, and all the way up to government level as well. And if you really are going to make an impact, then you probably need all of those levers really pulling in the same direction.
KAREN FOLEY: And you've mentioned with developing countries that they don't have the infrastructure to be able to do that. And you've mentioned the various things-- individual levels and policy levels-- and how, I guess, it's a chicken and egg sort of situation. But ultimately, if there were no policies to some extent, there's no incentive or perhaps penalty depending on how you view it.
TONI GLADDING: And it's technologically different. I mean, we've got some example plastics here. For instance, this is a PET bottle and there are PET trays. But this is something called high density polyethylene. So you can't mix the two. So if you're recycling these, you would have to put these three different waste management treatment processes.
So that's partly why, I mean, it's expensive to ship plastics, because it's light. It's expensive to recycle it, because they can't be mixed. So even the lids are sometimes different material to the actual bottle. It's about 50 different types of plastic. So you can't simply build a factory and recycle plastic. It's an expensive thing to do.
KAREN FOLEY: Which begs the question why we have so many different types of-- I keep going on in New Zealand. But we did used to have the milk in a sort of packet. And everyone then bought a carton and put their milk in that. And so we didn't have any of these milk bottles, for example. And all of that washing detergents, everything, all the plastic bottle sort of went.
And it did become a lot messy. But that was just the done thing. And everyone did it. And that was 20 years ago. We asked everyone at home how long they think a plastic bottle lasts in the ocean. Shall we see what they said? So we've got in the lead here 75% of people think it's 1,000 years, which is the highest number that we've had. That is a long time, even for me. What's the correct answer?
TONI GLADDING: It's more like 450 years. But it's still in the ocean. It breaks down into smaller pieces. That's the problem. So it's not like in 450 years there's no plastic anymore. What actually happens is the plastic degrades. Because UV light will degrade it, and the wave action, and all other sorts of things. And then it just becomes smaller pieces. And they can biopersist for a very long time. So technically, they could go on for many more years. So 1,000 years isn't a bad estimate.
KAREN FOLEY: No, exactly. OK, excellent. So what is your research? And what are you hoping to achieve by doing that?
CARL BOARDMAN: So I look at the environmental impact of materials. So very broadly speaking, I look at how biodegradable they might be in waste management treatment processes, like composting and anaerobic digestion, but also as well how biodegradable they might be in open environments, natural environments-- rivers, sediments, oceans.
So I like to get a handle on different types of materials. How long are they going to be around? I also then like to look at what kind of impact they might have when they degrade. So is there any kind of ecotoxicity, any toxic effects from these materials? So plastics, for instance, are known to absorb persistent organic pollutants that might be within ocean environments.
So you have these things like pesticides, PCBs, which many of them have been banned for a long time. But they exist at low level concentrations in the environment. When you have a plastic material that ends up in the oceans, I think of it kind of a bit like a sponge, a chemical sponge. It will absorb all these pollutants and concentrate them potentially up through the food chain. So that plastic piece that inadvertently a fish is consumed-- it didn't want to, it's done it by accident-- might not be toxic to the fish, OK?
But if we go up the food chain, a predator eats 1,000 of those fish. Can you see how then it concentrates further and further up the food chain? So it might not be the plastic itself that has a physical entanglement, detrimental effects. It might actually be that of the pollutants that are leaching out from the material itself and also the persistent organic pollutants that have been residing in the environment already, leaching out after as well.
So in a way, it's multifaceted. It really is. Once you start getting these pollutants within any kind of biological entity, they start messing around with all kinds of biological processes. They start crossing your cell membranes. They can mess around with your DNA structure. And you have all sorts of stresses and strains associated with that as well.
So it can be quite problematic, and hence the focus that's been on it. So I look to basically quantify as many of those steps as possible with different colleagues and friends. So yeah, that's kind of what I like to. I try to work with companies as well who are looking to have more biodegradable materials and materials that are designed to be less impactful in the environment, should they be a fugitive plastic, which doesn't intend to go into the natural environment.
It's got an end of life intended purpose. But through inadvertently, catches by the wind or other processes, it ends up there. And so dealing with companies that take their social responsibility seriously. So yes, that's the difference that we're trying to make. So we're trying to understand it. We're trying to make a difference as well.
KAREN FOLEY: Brilliant. I'm going to ask you next, Toni. But I just want to take a trip to Teresa. Because people are talking about the various steps that they're taking to reduce their plastic.
TERESA: That's right. I mean, there's lots and lots of conversations here. It's great. Lots about composting, lots of big composters out there would like maybe some tips on composting. And there's the whole debate on single use plastics, how we can reduce our every day use of single use plastics.
And there was a nice idea from someone about-- you know how you have the colour coding on packaging for fats and protein? Could we have something on plastics that indicated the type of plastics and how we can then recycle them? Because I think there's a lot there that could be done out in the industry on making us more aware of what plastics-- and what can be recycled, which is still a little bit of a dark art, really.
KAREN FOLEY: No, absolutely yes. I mean, my friends in London have all of these various boxes and spend all of this time sorting and categorising things. And I was watching a programme the other week. And they were saying so much of the good intentions are spoiled because people don't wash things and they become contaminated, for example. So there's a lot of public education.
CARL BOARDMAN: It's tricky. I mean, picking up on what Teresa said there, so there's a couple of things. In terms of better labelling, there are schemes. There are European-wide schemes that promote it. I don't know if the camera can pick up this one. We have these of leaf in a ribbon-- so there are certified schemes that they will test and they will see if the materials are biodegradable in compost environments.
But they're not widely known. I mean, for instance, my family wouldn't know what that meant at all. So it's very tricky. I think you have to understand as well, this is a business world. And there are a lot of competing factions with different technologies. And so they're all kind of-- elbows around.
They all want a piece of this kind of green pie, if you like. So trying to get a consensus is really tricky. And this is where sometimes an industry-led consensus is great. But sometimes, you need a higher level kind of government or European kind of framework to really almost force people into a harmonised kind of labelling system as well.
KAREN FOLEY: Force people into a harmonised-- it sounds like a juxtaposition.
CARL BOARDMAN: It's tricky. It's tricky. I mean, there are plastics out there that are compostable as well. So these are usually designed for industrial composting processes, designed to be food caddies. They take your food away. They incorporate it into the industrial processes. There are other types of plastic as well that you could put in your home composting bin. But they would typically could take maybe about a year or something like that to degrade.
And as well, I mean, I've got compost heaps as well. You have to actually manage it. So you've got to turn that compost over. You've got to get the oxygen in there. Because basically, a compost heap will use all the oxygen within minutes within the core of it. So this is why you have to turn it and aerate it. So then you get lots of oxygen in there so the microbes can break down the difference types of polymers, natural and synthetic as well.
So yes, there's a lot there. So I mean, when you design any type of material, it's always useful to have the end of life process in mind. So there's a lot more of this kind of circular economy end of life thinking. So instead of just really designing, say, a carrier bag that can carry 10 kilos, into the design process at the beginning is, yes, we want to carrier bag that can hold 10 kilos. But we also want it to be recyclable, to be biodegradable. And this starts at the very beginning.
KAREN FOLEY: To cook our dinner, to be attractive.
CARL BOARDMAN: I mean, you start with a wishlist. And these companies have to work down it. And they're constrained by science sometimes. There's a lot of innovation out there. But still, we are still looking for effectively what would be a holy grail of plastic that could biodegrade in the natural environment. And we're currently not there. Whether it's fossil fuel derived or bio-based, we are not there yet. So there is a lot of scope for improvement there.
KAREN FOLEY: But composting is a thing that people can do at home, very easy to do. It can make a real difference and can be a good use, even if it is--
TONI GLADDING: Well, doing it requires a bit of space and a bit of technique. But it can be done.
KAREN FOLEY: We're nearly out of time. Any tips on composting, Toni?
TONI GLADDING: Gosh, tips on composting, no. I'm not a gardener. Turn it.
CARL BOARDMAN: Turn it regularly, yeah, yeah.
KAREN FOLEY: I've been meaning to set up a little compost heap. And I've never quite gotten around to it.
CARL BOARDMAN: Oh, get one that's on a rotating kind of thing.
KAREN FOLEY: Oh yeah? That's a good tip, see?
CARL BOARDMAN: Don't be breaking your back.
KAREN FOLEY: Excellent. All right, well, that has been an incredibly interesting session. Thank you both so much for coming along today. And thank you everyone for chatting at home, to Teresa and to each other. And some great stuff is going on there. We're going to show you a short video now.
If you like the Faculty of STEM's Facebook page, which you can find the Open University STEM or @OpenUniSTEM, you'll see there are regular sessions on Meet Us Mondays. And we're going to show you a short video now. But again, that's a great way to meet various academics and other members of staff from around the Open University each Monday. So join us after that video. And then we're going to be talking about Students for Students. So I'll see you in about five minutes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]