I feel ashamed of how far we have fallen when it comes to plastics. I remember when we tried in earnest to spend a whole month shopping without buying anything packaged in plastic, and even further back when we chose Coke, tonic or Fanta at the store only if they came in returnable bottles with the old-style collar neck rather than just any plastic bottle. Today, we mostly settle for collecting household plastic waste more or less selectively and, with patience, waiting every two weeks in line to use the so-called bottle return machine, which in reality has become the plastic return machine. The mission to phase plastics out of our daily lives feels almost as if it never happened at all. What remains of it is only that the caps no longer fall off our soft drink bottles.
It is easy to point at the big plastic producers and blame it all on those multinationals, but that is only a half-truth, just one dimension of the problem. Shifting the blame takes the responsibility off ourselves, yet on the other side it is us. Me, you, the person sitting across from you, every colleague and every family member. In the EU each person generates on average more than 36 kilograms of plastic packaging waste every year. One does not need to be a hardcore environmentalist to see the problem with the fact that more than half of all plastic ever produced was made in just the past 25 years, and that plastic is now found in the deepest oceans, the most remote mountains, and even in our brains (!!!), indeed throughout the human body everywhere.
It must be added here and now that when it comes to recycling plastic packaging, we Hungarians are at the very bottom of the EU ranking, far behind the average. In 2023 our recycling rate was only around 23%. So now you understand why I feel ashamed. In just a few weeks Eurostat will again publish the annual ranking for the EU27 in this field. It is predictable that we will still be at the very end of the list. I cannot recall any announcement, project, investment or report from the past year that would suggest we have made progress. To move forward, we would have needed large-scale, visible and effective nationwide campaigns in mechanical recycling, while here the debate and focus remain stuck on the bottle return machines, the so-called REpoints, and the disputes surrounding their operation.
Reading the publications of Plastic Recyclers is not uplifting in general, but the Hungarian data are especially disheartening. From last year’s Eurostat statistics it is clear that in 2023, while the EU average plastic recycling rate improved slightly from 40.7% to 41.5%, Hungary moved backward. Not a little, but significantly, by almost 5 percentage points, while our rate is barely more than half of the EU average to begin with. The EU’s expected target for 2025 is at least 55%. Belgium has already reached it at 59.5%, as has Latvia at 59.2%. Slovakia at 54.1%, the Czech Republic at 52.4%, Germany at 52.2% and Slovenia at 51.5% are also on track to achieve it. That Croatia at 28.2%, Denmark at 27.8%, Austria at 26.9% and France at 25.9%, which are slightly ahead of us, will certainly not reach it only means for me that we all have reason to be ashamed, both collectively and individually. At the same time we urgently need to change course and act. And in this the voluntary carbon market could also be of help to us, yet we are not making use of it. But how exactly?
The solution lies in every discarded plastic bottle. The production of different types of plastics (polymerization) is fundamentally based on petroleum derivatives, and depending on the type of plastic, the manufacture of each kilogram of virgin plastic releases between 2 and 6 kilograms of carbon dioxide into our world. Each plastic PET bottle alone is responsible for emissions equivalent to three times its own weight. This is a problem, but it is also an opportunity. If we recycle plastic waste through material recycling, whether packaging or production waste, we avoid the polymerization of hydrocarbons and release significantly less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. While this figure must be adjusted for the carbon footprint of the recycling process itself, including logistics and energy demand, the majority of the emission savings still remain.
In other words, plastic recycling is also a climate protection project, where the resulting verified carbon dioxide emission reductions — provided the project is voluntary, additional and goes beyond the legal minimum requirements — can be converted into high-quality carbon credits with significant monetary value. The sale of these carbon credits for offsetting purposes, ceteris paribus, improves the return on investment of the company undertaking recycling, enabling it to pursue further investments. Moreover, this additional carbon market revenue can attract new players to the recycling sector who previously found the economics unviable but are now encouraged by the opportunities embedded in carbon credits. This can become a positive self-reinforcing cycle which, built on business foundations, can significantly contribute to tackling both plastic pollution and global warming. This is why together with my colleagues at mitigia we developed an innovative methodology for carbon credit generation supporting mechanical recycling, which can enhance the profitability of such new projects. As a result, more of these investments can materialize, and in the coming years Hungary may finally catch up with the EU average in plastic recycling, reducing both the extent of plastic pollution and the volume of our carbon emissions. This is a genuine “two-in-one” benefit, and on top of it, Barbie can at last be freed from her world encased in plastic and perhaps, for the first time in her life, take a breath.
This article was first published on the 23rd of September, by Levente Tóth, CEO of mitigia, on their personal LinkedIn profile.
