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CrowdScience: Do I really have to clean my recycling?

Discussion & Talk

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30/07/2021 GMT

Do I really have to clean my recycling?

BBC World Service - CrowdScience, Do I really have to clean my recycling?

We tackle questions about the best ways to recycle.

Does cleaning food containers before recycling them waste water? Are plastic alternatives better than recycled traditional plastic and could we ever recycle our plastic at home?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It’s a well-known phrase that we all try and follow in our day to day lives. But are our current recycling habits the best they can be? It’s a hot topic at Crowdscience - multiple listeners have contacted Crowdscience with questions about the ins and outs of recycling. 

We follow one listener’s food waste to a processing plant to investigate whether or not it could be processed in our own homes. But aside from the food waste, what about the containers it comes in? We investigate if food containers really need to be cleaned before we put them in recycling bins, or if that just wastes water.

Recycling processes differ all over the world, so we hear from reporter Chhavi Sachdev in Mumbai, India, who follows her plastic waste to find out how plastic sorting and recycling is a whole economy of its own.

But new technologies have meant that biodegradable and bioderived plastics are starting to appear in our packaging, and one Crowdscience listener wants to know which is better for the environment – traditional plastic that has been recycled, or bioplastic and compostable alternatives? And looking to the future, could we ever recycle our plastic waste at home and use 3D printers to make useful things out of our own waste?

Marnie Chesterton delves into these questions with Circular Economy Project Manager Dr Rhiannon Hunt of Manchester Metropolitan University, to discover the details of recycling and unearth how we can make our own recycling as efficient as possible. 

With Dave Atkins, reporter Chhavi Sachdev and Dr Rhiannon Hunt. 

Presented by Marnie Chesterton and Produced by Hannah Fisher for the BBC World Service.



[Image credit; Getty Images]

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