Soft plastic is being collected but almost all burned in Irish kilns or recycled abroad

THE FRIDGE IS filled with leftovers, and after the frantic weekend of cooking, lunch is turkey sandwiches. You grab the sliced pan and the family polishes off the whole loaf.

This was a commitment made in the National Waste Action Plan for a Circular Economy 2020-2025 which promised to “work with the waste sector to encourage investment to allow for the collection of soft plastics and black plastics”. Alice Chambers / Noteworthy Bales of plastic at the Limerick Polymers Production plant Alice Chambers / Noteworthy / Noteworthy

It is “typically cleaner and easier to deal with because the factory will have someone sorting it there, it’s one stream”, explained Mark Sheahan, general manager at Limerick Polymer Production, a new plastic sorting facility that deals exclusively with post-consumer plastic waste. The post-bread life of a sliced pan pack Ireland’s recycling system is unique in the EU because it’s the only one that’s almost fully privatised. Households pay a company to collect their bins and that company loads all your recycling into a truck.

“It was to do with the equipment that was there,” he said. Soft plastic was “reintroduced [in 2021] because obviously we need to start recycling these”, especially given the context of the new government Waste Action Plan. This is an easy message to communicate and means that the material is there to be recycled as the technology improves.

Households do something similar on a smaller scale when they pack recyclables together; imagine an Easter egg with all its packaging – foil, plastic and paper – if you put all that back in the box together, and that gets compacted, it makes it a lot more difficult to separate. Over 70% plastics burned According to the latest figures from the Environmental Protection Agency from 2020, 71% of plastic packaging – just under 220,000 tonnes – was burned for energy recovery in 2020.

“Recycling rates remain worryingly low for plastic packaging with a continuing trend towards energy recovery,” the EPA also stated. They need to produce purity and consistency of polymer type. The purer and more consistent does better on the market. A plastic polymer refers to the chemical composition of the plastic. Not all plastics have the same molecules arranged in the same way, that’s what gives us clear or cloudy, soft or rigid plastics. If a bale of plastic after sorting is mostly the same polymer, Gaynor also explained, the MRFs will get more funding from Repak.

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