[2/6: What do people think?] SG's plastic use.
Public perception towards plastics reduction and recycling
Should Reduce, Reuse and Recycle
According to a survey of 70 respondents that I conducted around Singapore, 85% of Singaporeans believe plastic waste will become a critical issue of national security in the future.
Out of the 85%, 64% worry about Singapore having to encroach upon other countries’ land spaces for a new landfill, emphasizing the critical need to cut down on unnecessary waste generation. The remaining proportion of those who agree it is a critical issue feel that excessive plastic consumption wastes increasingly scarce oil resources, which could have been better spent for other purposes.
Incineration of waste is a waste management strategy in Singapore. It is by no means a cure-all: incinerator bottom ash and incinerator fly ash are produced; highly toxic substances that contain heavy metals and organic pollutants. Burning plastics also expends more energy and resources than recycling, according to a study by WRAP UK in 2010.
The construction and maintenance of incineration plants is also expensive and will take a toll on the economy. Reduction of plastic waste would therefore be of economic interest too.
Thus the need to scale down on plastic - especially unnecessary single-use ones - is clear. “It’s about kindness. Being kind to people, being kind to the environment,” Aarti Giri, founder of Plastic-Lite Singapore, said when asked about her motivation to reduce plastic waste.
Should not Reduce, Reuse or Recycle
Some Singaporeans in my survey dismissed the need to reduce plastic consumption, however. Although most of them - 43% - do not reduce plastic use for the sake of convenience, some cite a lack of trust in Singapore’s plastic recycling system.
Others pointed to the efficient waste management in Singapore that prevented air, water and land pollution from plastic waste, rendering the need to reduce plastics unnecessary. This was a view reflected in one Straits Times Forum Letter in 2018.
Should Reduce, Reuse but should not Recycle
When only 7% out of all plastic recyclables make it to the recycling facility, it is unsurprising that Singaporeans would doubt the value of their efforts. One Channel NewsAsia article captures this scepticism in its opening statement: “SINGAPORE: If you think putting your plastic waste into the blue bin means it will automatically be recycled, think again.”. The article highlights the struggle of plastic recycling facilities to cope with the volume of often contaminated plastic recyclables. It seals the fate of these items to the incinerator. Similarly, another Business Insider article ran the headline “An MIT researcher says we should trash all our recyclable plastic, and he’s probably right”, and it details the ways plastic recycling is neither economical nor environmentally friendly.
The efficacy of recycling has been debatable, especially following China’s ban on imported plastic scrap, which sent shockwaves through the recycling industry. It has recycling to be but a “greenwashed accessory”, as put by one survey respondent. Another called it a “feel-good mentality”.
In an email exchange with Professor Walter Theseira, a Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) who supported Singapore’s recently passed Resource Sustainability Bill, he said:
“... a lot of small problems have to be solved for every recyclable piece to make it recyclable. This is costly. As for why these costs should not be ignored, the problem is the costs represent resources wasted, which counteracts the whole point of recycling. If it requires fewer resources to incinerate waste than to recycle, then we should incinerate – that would actually be greener."
With headwinds in the global recycling industry, Member of Parliament (MP) Mr Louis Ng also reinforced that the message should not so much be to recycle as to reduce. He revealed in an interview that some of Singapore’s recycling was being transported to the Middle East, and it would not make economic or environmental sense to ship recyclables all the way there. He agreed that sometimes, it may even be more environmentally friendly to incinerate than recycle.
Furthermore, plastics form the dominant fuel source for the incineration process; without plastics, the total energy generated from the waste-to-energy incineration plants would be reduced. Ironically, as environmentalist Martin Blake, the strategic advisor to Singapore-based waste management firm Blue Planet Environmental Solutions said in the article above: ”our waste-to-energy incineration plants are in reality, energy-to-waste incineration plants.”
In advocating reducing first, MP Mr Louis Ng highlighted the Zero Waste Masterplan he launched in Nee Soon East district as more effective. For example, they had altogether saved 28,300 disposables by December 2019. He hoped that other 88 constituencies in Singapore would quickly follow this approach, and was also planning to propose banning disposables in hawker centres for dine-in. When asked about hawkers’ concern that they would be wasting more water and money, he said that a centralized area for dishwashing machines would take the burden of washing away from hawkers.