Wish-cycling is a well-intentioned but harmful behaviour, which involves throwing questionable items into a recycling bin in the hope that they will be recycled. You may have wish-cycled if you’ve looked at an item and thought ‘This should be recyclable’ or ‘I’m not sure about this, but I don’t want it to go to landfill,’ and put it in the recycling bin with no further thought. However, wish-cycling can have a significant impact on our fragile recycling systems, and is harming our planet, due to the contamination of different products which leads to less recycling and more waste harming our planet.
Contaminated waste is a huge problem in recycling. It occurs when different types of material are mixed in a way that a recycling facility can’t deal with – this can be recyclables mixed with nonrecyclables, or different sorts of recyclable materials mixed together, for example, plastic with paper. Materials contaminated by food or grease are a growing problem as recycling has become more widely adopted. This contamination results from a lack of education, the introduction of single-stream recycling (where all types of waste are placed in the same bin) and the increase in the amount of different types of material used for packaging. When the proportion of contaminated material in a batch of recycling gets too high, the entire batch will be sent to landfill, even though there will be items within it that are recyclable. The tolerable proportion will vary depending on who is doing the recycling and what their profit margins are.
Recycling facilities use automated machinery to separate waste, which may need to be stopped if the wrong type of material enters it. This means that the recycling process takes longer and costs more money – the more money it costs, the less return the company gets from recycling the material. For recycling to be viable, companies who carry it out need to make a profit – the value of processed recyclable material is declining, which means that if the cost increases, companies may decide to stop all together. They could also choose to reject waste from repeat offenders, which means local authorities and businesses may not be able to recycle any of their materials.