Duty of care
What is recycling?
Recycling is reprocessing waste into products, materials or substances. It is the third tier of the waste hierarchy and the one most businesses mean when they talk about their environmental performance.
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<figure>
<img src="https://wasteoptix.co.uk/glossary/recycling/diagram.svg" alt="recycling — diagram from WasteOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
<figcaption>
<a href="https://wasteoptix.co.uk/glossary/recycling">What is recycling?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://wasteoptix.co.uk">WasteOptix</a>
</figcaption>
</figure>It depends on the quality of what arrives. Contaminated material costs more to sort and is worth less sorted, which is why a collector's segregation discipline shows up directly in the price they get for a load.
Reported recycling rates need to be traceable to what actually happened to the material. A rate calculated from what was collected rather than from what was reprocessed is a claim about intention.
It does not include energy recovery, which sits a tier lower. Describing incineration with energy recovery as recycling is a common and material misstatement.
What goes wrong in practice
- Rates reported from collection data rather than from reprocessing outcomes.
- Energy recovery counted as recycling.
- Contamination charges absorbed centrally rather than traced back to the source.