What's Recycling got to do with climate change?

Published by phil hurst for Campaign for Real Recycling in Environment and also in Local Government

Is recycling good for reducing a council’s carbon footprint? The simple answer is yes – and its even better than recovering energy from all those materials, despite what the energy from waste companies may be saying.

WRAP – the governments Waste Resources Action Programme, has consistently reviewed all the studies on the recycling verses energy recovery debate, and is unequivocal in its conclusions: “The UK’s current recycling of those materials (paper, glass, plastics, aluminium and steel) saves between 10-15 million tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year compared to applying the current mix of landfill and incineration with energy recovery to the same materials.” In other words, if a council wants to reduce its carbon footprint, recycling materials is preferable to trying to recover the energy from them.

Another carbon balance issue that local authorities might be facing questions on from a sceptical public is whether it’s worth recycling if the material has to be sent over to China for reprocessing.

Common sense tells us the benefits are reduced by shipping materials to the Far East – but again it’s a matter of balance. WRAP has also looked into this in some detail, particularly the export of paper and plastic to China. They concluded; “there are CO2 savings to be made from recycling … even if the recovered materials have to be transported to China. That is, the emissions associated with exporting material to China do not outweigh the CO2 benefits of recycling.”

There is no need, therefore, for those in charge of recycling in local authorities to feel peripheral to the goings on in Coppenhagen this week.

Recycling in the UK, even at 2006 levels (and we have come a long way since then), accounted for 10% of the annual CO2 emissions from the transport sector, and equates to taking 3.5 million cars off UK roads.

But before recycling managers crow too loudly about their contribution to reducing the council’s carbon footprint, how much carbon is saved by recycling depends very much on how you collect and sort your materials. That, however, is another story.

www.wrap.org.uk  -  serch for: "Environmental Benefits of recycling" (2006) and "CO2 impacts of transporting the UK's recovered paper and plastic bottles to china" (2008)