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Things fall apart. It’s the nature of the beast. Entropy is built into the universal condition – get used to it. Why so glum? Because one of the gorgeous floor lamps that we bought from Habitat sometime last century just stopped working. But as I say, these things are inevitable, even in a thing of metal and glass . . . oh yes, and plastic.
Insisting on my inalienable Right To Repair, I bring the ailing fixture to my desk and apply my trusty multi-tester. Fuse – OK; floor switch – OK; supply to lampholder – OK. Which leaves the connection between lampholder and lamp cap. Hmmm – dodgy. The live connection in the E14 lampholder has probably given into the inevitable pressures of time and collapsed just enough to fail to make the connection.
Two options, then. Screw the damned lamp in even tighter – that works, albeit adding to the risk of arcing a bit further down the line and I don’t fancy that idea, or change the lampholder. The plastic lampholder.
Checking through my Circular Economy Primer I see that lampholders should be capable of disassembly and that the mounting mechanism should be able to receive a new, similar, lampholder. Sounds reasonable, except that no one told the product manufacturer. You’ve already guessed this one, I’m sure. The lampholder is one of those single assembly jobs that locks everything up tight, so the only way to get it off the fixture is to carefully . . . destroy it.
The next step will be to sweep up all the plastic shards that are now all over the floor, confirm that the plastic material is RIC1-rated and add it to my curbside recycling. Ah . . . not RCI1; not recyclable, then. And so into the bin it goes and off to the nearest landfill site, where the pieces will lie – forever.
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Circular Economy; it’s a time thing.
We’re doing well with the CE conversation, but it’ll take us a long time to get to the place where the decisions we take today will affect the process that I describe above and we’ll lose a lot of plastic to landfill in the meantime. Or will we . . . ?
There are seven grades of plastic according to the Resin Identification Code (RIC) and the seventh one (RIC7) is titled, ominously, Miscellaneous. That makes you wonder how many types of plastic there really are. At the moment, curbside recycling only accepts RIC1 (PET)/PETE) and RIC2 (HDPE). That’s great for plastic bottles and yogurt pots, but not so good for the kind of plastics that we see used in lighting fixtures, which are typically polypropylene (RIC5) and all the varieties of RIC7.
Happily – and its not often we can say that – there is a lot of work going on in the recycling of plastics and, especially, the plastics that are currently going to landfill. The term that we should be getting used to is Chemical Recycling.
Chemical Recycling is a system for processing plastic waste that can’t be recycled using conventional mechanical means. While mechanical recycling processes do not significantly change the chemical structure of the material, chemical recycling breaks down the structure of the plastic, creating a new, virgin-quality, base feedstock for producing new plastic media.
Put simply, it implies that we need no longer talk about ‘plastic waste’ and all of those landfill sites filled with plastic material can become ‘plastic mines’ to support an on-going, circular, plastics system.
And it happens that there’s an online conference in October that we can all attend!
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The British Plastics Federation (BPF) is hosting its third Chemical Recycling seminar, featuring speakers from Unilever, Dow and the Food and drink Federation (these things aren’t always about you and me!). It’s a half-day event, in collaboration with Plastics Europe and provides an in-depth examination of the latest developments in chemical recycling.
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