It's really hard to tell the story coherently
of what happens to plastic.
To watch the news and to look at all the media coverage,
you would think the debate about plastic waste
has already been resolved and won.
But then if you actually look at the numbers,
not only has the amount of plastic that we're producing
massively increased, it's gonna increase again
significantly in the next 10 years.
We are producing more plastic than ever
and it has to go somewhere, so it's very important to know
what happens to this stuff after we finished using it.
Tesco is a very large supermarket chain,
it's the U.K.'s largest by far.
It makes an enormous amount of profit every year.
I noticed at my local Tesco Superstore
that these white boxes have appeared
with a big sign on saying, recycle your soft plastics here,
recycle your wrappers, your bags,
your crisp packets, your bread bags.
I wanted to find an electronic way to follow this stuff
so I could be absolutely sure,
because it's very difficult
to track waste streams around the world.
So, we've just seen a red unmarked lorry
and we're gonna follow it for a while and see where it goes.
I assumed that all the waste collected by Tesco
would have a single outcome.
It would go to one place.
It would either be buried or it would be recycled,
but what I discovered was a much more
complicated picture than that.
It just is very complicated, very messy.
There's good and bad.
Hi, my name's Kit,
I'm an investigative reporter with Bloomberg.
Most people have no idea what happens to their waste
once they put it in a bin or a trash can
and that's especially true of plastic.
It just goes away.
It's collected by a van
or it's deposited at a recycling point
and then it goes into this hidden ecosystem
that very few people have oversight of.
It goes off to sort of dirty, smelly places to be sorted
and dealt with by someone else
and you don't think about it again.
But I was fascinated to find out exactly what happens to it
and exactly where these places are and where it goes.
Tesco makes a big play of reuse as one of its efforts
to help prevent plastic pollution.
And by that they mean
that the plastic products they're selling to consumers
they want to be able to recycle them
and turn them into something else of equivalent.
So they want to be able to reuse bottles
and packaging that they sell.
I had three digital trackers placed in wrappers or bags
and put into the Tesco boxes,
which said they were going to recycle them.
And then I had to wait a few days to see where they went.
And yeah, they started to move within three or four days
of me dropping them off
and I could see them moving by truck.
One of them went to East London and then sort of disappeared
into what looked like the banks of the Thames.
It may have been lost, it may have been shaken loose.
I really don't know what happened to it.
But the two other ones took a pretty clear path,
which was to go to these Tesco logistics centers
on the outskirts of London,
and then they both headed for the same port,
which is Harwich International.
And from there they went quiet for a few hours
and the next time I saw them
was when they were in the Netherlands and heading East.
There are some kinds of plastic
that are relatively easy to recycle
and those can be sold on the open market profitably.
Things like clear plastic bottles
are made from something called PET,
and that's good recycling material.
You can reuse that over and over again.
Clear plastic wrap, as long as it doesn't have a label
or colorants or heat retardants in it
is good recycling material.
You can melt that down and reprocess it.
But as anyone who goes to the supermarket
to buy food will know, hardly any of the plastic products
that we're sold are just clear wrap.
They have labels on, they will normally be
coming into contact with food.
And all that means that its not all the same stuff.
It's different grades of plastic.
And you can't just put all that material together into one
bulk load, and then melt and recycle it,
what you'd get if you did that is
unusable, terrible quality plastic.
So what you need to is separate it.
And to this day, the only way to do that
is to have people go through by hand,
feel the material with their fingers.
Sometimes burn it with a lighter
to work out what grade of plastic it is
and separate it into different streams.
I had no idea that there's this incredibly expensive
and time-consuming process that has to go into
separating all the different grades.
They didn't stay long in the Netherlands.
They passed through very quickly
and then they went on a German motorway
and zipped across the country
in the space of 12 to 24 hours.
Finally they crossed the border into Poland
and I could see that both digital trackers,
although this happened on different days,
ended up at precisely the same spot.
This is the Eurokey site in Zielona Gora.
Zielona Gora is a small town in west Poland.
It's relatively close to the border with Germany.
So we knew we had to go and see
where Tesco's waste was being sent
and we knew the exact location it was going to.
So, I took a flight to Poland
and I teamed up with my colleague Wojciech
and we simply got in the car and drove out to Zielona Gora
and did a drive-by to look at the facility.
You can see piles and piles and piles of plastic.
This is a exit gate.
What we found in Zielona Gora
was a long industrial building, a warehouse.
It must have been as long as a football field or longer.
There were hundreds of tons of material
just sitting out there waiting to be sent somewhere else.
Mountains of it.
The reason plastic's going there is that
there's a particular British run company called Eurokey.
And Eurokey opened this large sorting facility
on the outskirts of Zielona Gora.
And that's where almost all the waste
that's coming through this supermarket system ends up.
There are two main reasons why
a lot of plastic waste is exported.
The first is that disposing of plastic
in a developed economy like the U.K.,
or Germany, or U.S. is expensive.
If you have to landfill, for example,
if you have to bury the plastic because you can't use it,
that costs, let's say 100 pounds a ton to do in the U.K.,
but the equivalent cost in Poland is significantly less.
It might cost you 20 or 30 pounds a ton
to use a landfill facility in Poland.
But there are also lots of government incentives
that are designed to make recycling
a more attractive proposition.
You get credits from the government
for exporting material for recycling.
So if your choice is export to Poland
or recycle the material in the U.K.,
the government gives you as much financial support
for exporting as it does for doing it domestically.
I mean the most important exercise
for the purposes of this project was to find out
what happened to the bad plastic,
because we know that some kinds of plastic are easy to use.
You know, the problem that the world has to grapple with
is what happens to the bad plastic?
What happens to the stuff that
simply isn't economic to use again.
So one of my digital trackers
was inside a lentil puff wrapper, like a snack wrapper.
And I was very keen to see where that one went.
And I saw it on the move again,
about 24 hours after it had been sorted at Zielona Gora,
and it headed east across Poland
to a tiny town called Poniatowa.
And I found out there that it had been sent
to a company called Stella Pack.
Stella Pack are an Eastern European bag maker,
they make garbage bags, essentially.
Sort of black sacks and things like that.
And they have a facility there that can turn
soft plastic back into soft plastic.
But they also have a way to dispose of the plastic
they can't use, they have an onsite incinerator.
Which provides heat and energy for their factory.
Plastics are made from oil.
They're essentially fossil fuels, so they burn really well.
They burn in a similar way as crude oil does.
And so they're great material for incinerating for energy.
And in Poland they have a huge cement industry.
The cement industry requires a lot of heat and energy
to calcify limestone powder and turn it into cement.
They have these gigantic kilns that run up to
1,500 degree Celsius or 2000 degree Celsius.
And that has traditionally, relied on Polish coal
for the energy source to heat the kilns.
But in recent years, the cement industry has discovered
all this waste material coming into Poland,
and that there's an abundance of it
and that it's very, very cheap.
And so it's widespread practice across Poland now
for plastic garbage and other types of garbage
to be incinerated for energy for the cement industry.
It's actually better than free fuel
because they are paid to take it.
If you're a cement maker, waste brokers in Poland
will pay you a small sum per ton to take their waste plastic
and incinerate it in your kiln.
So you're actually making money from your fuel source.
It's a fantastic deal,
if you're in the business of making cement.
The tracker inside the Tesco plastic bag stopped pinging
when it arrived in Zielona Gora after a few days.
And I assumed it had been shredded, or destroyed,
or trampled on, or taken.
And then when I got back from Poland,
I was surprised to see its location had changed,
and it gave its location as southern Turkey.
A couple of hundred kilometers from the Syrian border
in an industrial estate.
Not all the plastic that goes to Turkey
is gonna end up being dumped or buried
or incinerated illegally.
There are good recycling companies in Turkey
that have great reputations, but unfortunately,
Turkey as a destination for waste has huge problems.
And a lot of the plastic that goes to Turkey
ends up being illegally disposed of.
The tracker ended up at this industrial estate.
A sort of quite remote one.
There was no plastic recycling company nearby
that we could identify,
so we were confused as to why it was there.
And we sent a journalist to the ground,
to drive out and visit this site.
What she found outside a warehouse, just left in a big pile,
was tons and tons of waste
from plastic waste from around Europe.
The facility itself wasn't a recycling facility.
It was obviously just left there
before it could be moved somewhere else.
I don't have any idea what happened to the tracker material
that went to that industrial estate in Turkey.
I can't imagine that it was possible to recycle it,
but I don't know what happened to it after that.
But we know that Tesco waste material
has been found in that very area for a long period of time.
As recently as a few months ago,
I spoke to an activist who found a Tesco carrier bag,
just left by the side of a field
in a smoldering pile of burnt plastic.
Obviously it had been illegally dumped.
Tesco is a very large supermarket chain.
It's the UK's largest by far.
It makes an enormous amount of profit every year.
And it also has the incredible
logistics infrastructure in place
to make sure it's fresh bread and milk and meat
at all its stores around the U.K.
It has a network.
And if this entity can't properly dispose of plastic,
what hope is there for a little cash-strapped town council
that we want to dispose of our plastic by the curbside.
The reason Tesco is exporting plastic is because
it's the most cost efficient solution to their problem.
So the reality is despite all the nice words
and the good intentions,
that still the vast majority of soft plastic
that goes into the market is either gonna be incinerated
or it's gonna be buried.