Recycle Labels Are a Joke, but not funny

This label really annoys me. I would like to stuff it in the bin and slam the lid shut. But I mustn’t do so. Why?

Everything about this symbol seems designed to confuse. It looks like the Recycle symbol, but it’s in black, which suggests ‘No’. There’s a thin white line as a bar across the image, again a recognised signifier of ‘No’. But the thinness of the bar counter-suggests a ‘Maybe’. Then there’s the text. Definitely a ‘no’. So we have three ‘No’s’ and one ‘Maybe’. You’d be forgiven for throwing the packaging into the landfill bin and getting on with measuring out a gin.

And of course, this little symbol is competing with a lot of other messages on the packaging. It’s small. You’ve got to be looking for it to see it.

There’s further confusion. Here’s one accepted definition of this symbol. ‘“Not recycled” means less than 20% of people have access to recycling facilities for these items.’ But wait, another definition, from another recycling website, says “…this packaging is only being recycled by 20% of councils…” So that’s two quite different interpretations of the meaning of the 20%, a twenty percent, remember, that you will only know about if you look it up.

So it says, essentially, you should most probably put this in landfill because it will not be recycled, and if you put it in the Blue Bin (in Suffolk, that’s the Recycling Bin), it might screw up the recycling machinery.

More confusion. I feel a funk song coming up, featuring balls.

I had scampi last night. Frozen. Young’s. Very nice. And on that packaging was the dreaded ‘Not Yet Recycled’ symbol. So in the bin with you. But wait. “In addition, Young’s was able to replace 127 tonnes of oriented polypropylene polyethylene plastic from products such as its scampi bags with a polyethylene material that can be recycled with shopping bags at supermarkets.” (Oct 2020) But is my bag an old bag, as it were? Do the new bags have a different symbol? I don’t bloody know.

There is a hint. The word ‘bag’. I think this means you can recycle it at your supermarket with your carrier bags.

So where are we? The ‘Not Yet Recycled’ symbol doesn’t mean what it says. The packaging can sometimes be recycled. Sometimes the material itself is recyclable, but not if it’s mixed with other material. Sometimes you can take it to your local supermarket and they will deal with it. Sometimes the local council will accept it. Sometimes it’s got to be landfill-binned. That’s all clear. But after that, it’s just murk…but it’s very possible Terracycling will take it.

Use It All is investigating what can and can’t be recycled when it comes to the less clear-cut labels .

So watch this Use It All space.

This is the first strike in Use It All’s attempt to clear up the confusing world of recycling, and a campaign to nudge us to being better at recycling.