Biking on your rubbish
If you have around 500 empty yoghurt cups, you can make a baby buggy, while it takes about 100 empty cans to make a new bicycle wheel. Rubbish isn't rubbish at all. Rubbish – technically known as waste – is a sustainable source of new products. At Inholland, we are contributing to this by separating our waste.
Since the start of this academic year, all our locations have brand-new waste-sorting stations. Here, you can deposit your paper and cardboard, coffee cups, PMD waste and residual waste in separate bins. 'PMD’ stands for plastics, metal and drinks cartons.
Conserving valuable resources
Maybe you separate your PMD waste at home, too. If you do, you've seen how large the volume of this material is and how little you then have ‘left over’ as residual waste. That is a good sign, because processing residual waste is expensive. It has to be incinerated, which does not produce much of anything aside from energy and filler for asphalt. What's more, incineration is bad for the environment.
Plastic bottles become sports jerseys
Luckily, PMD waste offers us many more possibilities. The next time you are about to throw away an empty plastic soft-drink bottle, for instance, take a good look at it first. That little bottle alone contains three different types of plastic. Each part – the rigid cap, the softer bottle and the flexible label – can provide raw material for making other, new products. Six plastic bottles, when spun into yarn, are enough to make a sports jersey. That's completely sustainable and fair!
50 per cent less CO2
Wondering how we recycle all the different kinds of plastic? After the PMD waste has been compacted into bales, our waste processing partner takes it to a sorting machine. Next, the different types of plastic are melted down and turned into small pellets. The plastic in these pellets is just as good as plastic made from oil. Yet they have only half the carbon footprint of new plastic. And the best part is that plastic can be recycled again and again!
Tips to reduce plastic waste
- Recycling your plastic is good, but using less is even better:
- Drink water from your own refillable bottle.
- Buy fruit and vegetables without packaging or in a reusable bag.
- Bring your own bag with you when shopping.