Mail-Back Recycling Schemes Don't Work Nearly As Well As You'd Like to Believe
By Katherine Martinko | July 29, 2021 | Treehugger
Mail-back recycling schemes are a terrible idea, according to Jan Dell. The independent engineer and founder of an NGO called The Last Beach Cleanup is so irate at the greenwashing generated by these schemes, that her organization has launched a lawsuit against TerraCycle, the most well-known proponent of mail-back recycling, and eight other product companies, including Gerber, Clorox, Tom's of Maine, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola. The lawsuit calls on these companies to stop advertising, marketing, and labeling hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of products as being recyclable when the numbers really don't add up.
Mail-back programs involve filling a box with discarded packaging that's typically hard to recycle, such as condiment sachets, chip bags, toothbrushes, and more, and sending it to a third-party recycler like TerraCycle for processing. Consumers are told that their waste gets turned into useful items like park benches and picnic tables—despite the obvious fact that these items have a finite lifespan and will eventually get sent to landfills since plastic can only ever be downcycled and turned into a lesser version of itself.
These mail-back programs are still not widely used, but Dell doesn't want them to be because they make little sense. She describes them in a press release as a "major climate fail," based on calculations that were done jointly with Beyond Plastics, as part of a fact sheet published in June 2021:
"[We assessed] the carbon emissions and packaging waste of four types of common single-use plastic products if they were to be mailed back in cardboard boxes at scale nationwide—condiment packets, chip bags, plastic cups, and plastic cutlery. The carbon emissions from mailing back 6.6 billion condiment packets would be 104,000 metric tonnes of CO2 per year, roughly equal to the annual carbon emissions of 23,000 US cars. Shipping back 60% of the snack bags made by one US manufacturer would be equal to the annual carbon emissions of roughly 580,000 US cars."
This means that trucking millions of boxes of used plastic products across the country would only "speed the rise in global temperatures as we creep ever closer to the 1.5˚C increase that scientists agree we must stay within to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."