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Early on in “The Graduate”, Dustin Hoffman, as Benjamin, receives some career advice.

 

At the time—1967—even Mr McGuire couldn’t have envisaged the sheer range and staying power that plastic would display. Forty years on, two images have made this plain. One is Chris Jordan’s photo of the plastic objects, from bottle tops to cigarette lighters, that turn up in the stomach of an albatross chick on Midway Atoll, 2,000 miles from the nearest continent. The other is the area now sketched on maps called the Pacific Garbage Patch, created by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Some say this vortex of floating plastic is the size of Texas; others say it’s the size of America.

 

In “The Enigma of Arrival”, V.S. Naipaul noted that “Things, objects, endure.” He might have added, “plastic especially”. Its durability, the fact it might move 2,000 miles, but never goes away, is the reason why needless uses of it, such as bottled water, attract such opprobrium. Many greens are less bothered by President Barack Obama holding a cigarette, which he does only in private, than holding a water bottle, which he does in public.

 

Recently the catering manager at the National Theatre in London was telling me about his efforts to go green (the seasonal dishes were selling well), so I quizzed him about his not-so-green sales of bottled water. He said the income was important as the mark-up was excellent, so his approach was to make sure every bottle he sold was completely recyclable. He didn’t mean it would get broken up and used for something else, he meant the bottle would be sent back to a recovery plant, to re-emerge as another water bottle. This all happened nearby. He’d been to see it himself, and he gave me the address.

 

It’s an unlikely place to fall in love with, but there’s something very heartening about the Bywaters recovery plant in Bow, London. It’s described as an “undercover” site, which only means, disappointingly, that it’s indoors. Stand by the River Lea, and you have no idea that the building next to you is—as my guide, David Rumble, puts it—“a tip”. The place houses a Material Recovery Facility, known as a merf. Installed two years ago for £27m, it could double as some dusty cinema dystopia. The plant covers a huge area, 165 metres by 90, and once inside you are confronted by tonnes and tonnes of rubbish, heading towards a vast complicated contraption. It’s “Blade Runner” as seen by Heath Robinson.

 

Fork-lift trucks carefully load the rubbish onto conveyor belts—“like shaking sugar off a teaspoon” my guide says. The belts convey the rubbish through a series of processes that sort the glass from the plastic, aluminium, paper, cardboard and so on. Fast-moving magnets lift objects from one belt to another, jets of air knock them onto other belts, and dozens of hard rubber wheels fling paper and card into the air so they fall onto different lines. These lines of rubbish are distributed onto smaller and smaller belts, and then each type falls into a large container and is transported to a place that recycles it. All the techniques at Bywaters have been used elsewhere, but not quite in this combination.

 

There are many types of plastic, and the merf sorts it into three groups: PET (polyethylene terephthalate), HDPE (high-density polyethylene) and the rest. Near infra-red lights distinguish each type as it travels along the conveyor belt, and then more jets of air flick the plastic objects over a bar (or not) and onto separate conveyor belts. As Rumble explains, “Plastic does not degrade. Plastic polymers can be melted again and again. It’s not like paper. Each time you recycle paper, the fibres get shorter and shorter.” And you can’t mix your polymers. So we need a machine that sorts the PET, used in water bottles, from the HDPE, used in milk bottles.

 

The beauty of this is that you don’t burden the public with trying to reconcile the instructions on the council binbag with the small print on the products. The orange binbag from my council, for instance, said it didn’t recycle Tetrapaks; the council’s own website said that it did. At work, getting it right becomes even harder. Some canteens have six bins. Only one person needs to tip the remains of their chicken biryani into the wrong one, and everyone’s else efforts are—well—a waste.

 

Far easier to have only two bins, “dry recyclables” and “food waste”, and trust everyone to work that much out. Better to throw the money, then, not at educating the public, but at making recovery and recycling plants as sophisticated as possible, so that a virtue is made of plastic’s USP—the fact that it never goes away. This is the reverse of “Modern Times”, where the machines
dehumanise poor old Charlie Chaplin. This time the merf liberates the little guy from the tyranny of the bins.