IELTS Reading: Summary completion with a word list

Household recycling was one of the great behavioural successes of the late twentieth century. Within about fifteen years, sorting rubbish went from an eccentricity to a routine performed without complaint by the majority of households in most wealthy countries. Then the figures stopped moving. Rates across western Europe and North America have been roughly flat for a decade, and in several places they have slipped. The response has been a change of vocabulary: policy now speaks less of recycling and more of a circular economy, in which products are designed from the outset to be repaired, reused and eventually taken apart. The new language is an improvement. Whether it describes anything that is actually happening is a separate question.

The first thing to understand is that materials are not alike, and treating them as a single category called recycling has done a good deal of harm. Metals and glass can in principle be melted and reformed without limit, because melting resets them completely. Paper cannot: every cycle shortens the fibres, and a sheet can go round perhaps four to seven times before what is left is fit only for board or insulation. Most plastics fall somewhere worse, since the polymer chains break under heat and each pass produces a material with poorer properties than the one before, which is why so much of it ends up in products that will not themselves be recycled again.

Plastic is also the family that defeats the sorting line. A domestic bin may contain a dozen incompatible polymers that look and feel much the same, plus bottles whose caps are made of one thing and whose sleeves are made of another, plus films built from three or four layers bonded together precisely so that they cannot be separated. Modern plants identify a polymer by shining infrared light at it and reading the light that comes back, which works well except on anything coloured with carbon black, since black absorbs the signal and the object travels down the line unseen. Processes that break a polymer back into its building blocks would sidestep all of this, and several are being built, but they remain expensive and hungry for energy.

For twenty years none of this had to be faced, because the material could be sold. Mixed and lightly sorted recyclate was loaded into the containers that would otherwise have returned empty to Asia, and China bought it. In 2018 that stopped: new rules set contamination limits that almost no exported bale could meet, and the trade collapsed within months. Prices for collected material went negative in places, local authorities that had been receiving income began paying to dispose of the same stuff, and the sorting capacity that two decades of exporting had made unnecessary had to be built from nothing. It was, in a sense, a useful shock, because it revealed what the rate had been measuring.

One intervention works better than any other, and has done for fifty years. Where a refundable deposit is charged on a drinks container, between eighty-five and ninety-five per cent of them come back, against thirty to fifty per cent for the same containers collected from the kerbside. The material comes back clean and separated, which is worth more than the material itself. Schemes of this kind have nonetheless been resisted for decades by parts of the drinks and retail trades, on the grounds of cost and inconvenience to shops, and the countries that have them are mostly those that introduced them before the objection could organise itself.

The familiar ranking of reduce, reuse and recycle is ordered by how much difference each makes, and public attention is ordered almost exactly the other way round. This is not an accident. Recycling is the step that asks least: it requires no change in what is bought, only in where it is put afterwards, and it allows consumption to continue with a clear conscience. Reuse asks more and delivers more. Returnable bottles, collected, washed and refilled thirty or forty times, were entirely normal until the 1970s and were dismantled not because they failed but because one-way packaging was cheaper for the company doing the filling, the cost of dealing with it afterwards having been moved onto somebody else.

That last observation points at the only policy with much chance of changing design. If the firm that puts a product on the market is made to pay what it costs to deal with the product at the end of its life, the calculation that produced the multilayer film changes. Such schemes now exist in many countries, and the more sophisticated ones vary the fee according to how easily the item can be recycled, so that a bottle designed to be taken apart costs its producer less than one that is not. The evidence that this alters what gets designed is real but modest, largely because the fees have so far been set too low to matter beside the savings that caused the problem.

Circularity is a metaphor, and like all metaphors it flatters. No real loop is closed: every cycle loses material to wear, contamination and the simple fact that products are used in places where nobody collects them. A system that recovers ninety per cent at each pass has lost two thirds of the original material after ten. That is not an argument against recovery, which is plainly better than the alternative. It is an argument against the comfortable belief that a material put into the right bin has been dealt with, when what has actually happened is that its disposal has been postponed and its quality reduced.