Design 21: Social Design Network

Thank you Daniel for the comments and link to the Belu website. I enjoyed reading both. It seems obvious that they go a long way in doing the right thing. While doing so, they are fully aware of the fact that it is indeed a temporary solution but I agree with the value of those relatively small steps. The question of recycling is and will remain for some time a quite complex one. The increasing level of division of the industrial process has almost completely eliminated any level of vertical integration of the production process. Whereas, up to the 18th century, manufacturers like Wedgwood not only knew where his kaolin came from, (he send his own nephew to South Carolina to find it and ship to England). He was involved in building the canal that would bring it to his factory and controlled the distribution of his wares all the way to the consumer. 250 years later the people that are blowing the water bottles are most often not the same as those who injection mould the pre-forms. The typical number of different companies involved from raw material to bottler is anywhere between five en six. I raise this question of lack of vertical integration because it makes every step of the process dependent on information coming form the previous one. What happens too often is that the information is neither complete nor accurate. The result is that a material that is considered recyclable at source becomes non recyclable during the process. A good example of this is the way labels are attached to the bottles. Bottlers receive bottles from a blow moulder who specifies that the material is recyclable and subsequently puts on a label, that might include a logo or other encouragement to recycle, but by using a hot melt glue he makes the whole thing un-recyclable. Similar things happen at the consumer level. Some re-uses like spray bottles with plant fertilizer or household detergents also deteriorate the plastic and makes recycling into bottles difficult or impossible. I could easily be convinced that Belu is not aware of the percentage of PET versus corn starch material in the material they are using. Recycling is not the obvious simple procedure we expect it to be.
Some consumers also object to the slight yellowing of the PET whereas the chemical quality often improves (less acetaldehyde and ethylene glycol) after recycling. Unfortunately this has an effect on bottle to bottle recycling and encourages recyclers to use PET for textiles, carpets etc. or what is often called down-cycling. From my particular point of view I think it is urgent to improve this information system and to fully inform everybody involved in the process.