What Happens After the Bin? 🗑️ - Fionn’s Green Journey
Hey 🌍 Nature lovers and 🧭 curious minds,
Welcome back to Fionn’s Green Journey, where I take the things I’ve been quietly obsessing over and put them in front of you.
This month, I want to talk about something I do every single day in my Zürich flat.
I sort my rubbish.
PET bottles go in the mesh bag by the door. Glass gets carried to the collection point on the corner — separately, by colour. Paper in one pile. Aluminium in another. Organic waste in its own little caddy. And then there’s the general household plastic: the yoghurt pots, the cling film, the blister packs, the black plastic tray from last night’s dinner — which, until recently, all went into the grey bag. The “everything else” bag. The one I tried not to think about too hard.
I’m a chemist who works on pollution. I co-founded a nonprofit around removing microplastics from water. And somewhere between sorting my third type of rubbish and wondering what actually happens to it, I realised: I had no idea.
So I found out. And I want to share what I learned — not to make you feel bad, but because understanding the real system is the only way to actually improve it.
Switzerland: Recycling Utopia (Sort Of)
Let’s start with the good news, because there genuinely is some.
Switzerland is, by several measures, an extraordinary place to recycle. The numbers for certain materials are world-class: 97% of glass is recycled here. 83% of PET bottles. 91% of aluminium. These aren’t aspirational targets — they’re real, verified, closed loops. A PET bottle sold in Switzerland pays a tiny disposal fee at point of purchase, gets collected, sorted, and turned back into new bottles within the country. It’s genuinely circular. It works.
Switzerland also recycles or composts around 52% of its total municipal waste — well above the European average of 46%, and one of the highest rates in the world for an overall system.
So far, so virtuous. ✅
But here’s where I need to complicate the picture.
For general household plastics — the yoghurt pots, the packaging, the mixed stuff, Switzerland’s material recycling rate is somewhere around 9–10%. The rest? The majority is incinerated. Switzerland has 30 municipal waste incineration facilities, and since a landfill ban came into force in 2000, all non-recycled combustible waste must be burned.
Now, to be fair: Swiss incineration is not the chaotic open-pit burning you’d picture in a nightmare scenario. The plants are heavily regulated, produce energy, and recover metals from the ash. It is genuinely better than landfill in many respects.
But it is not recycling. And for most of the plastic in your kitchen — the mixed, complicated, multi-material stuff — that’s where it’s quietly been going. 🔥
Zoom Out: The Global Picture Is Starker
Here’s a number I find genuinely staggering: globally, less than 10% of all plastic is recycled as material. In 2022, only 9.5% of the 400 million tonnes of new plastic produced came from recycled sources. In the United States, it’s closer to 5%. Less than 1% of plastic is ever recycled more than once.
The rest? About 50% goes to landfill. 19% is incinerated. And roughly 22% is what the OECD politely calls “mismanaged” — burned in open pits, dumped in unofficial sites, or lost into rivers, soils, and oceans.
These numbers have barely moved in decades. Despite the bins, the symbols, the campaigns, the pledges — the needle has stayed stubbornly under 10%.
This is not a failure of individual effort. It’s a failure of system design.
Why??? The Chemistry Behind the Problem
This is where I feel like I can actually add something, because as a chemist, the reasons recycling struggles aren’t mysterious. They’re molecular.
Plastic isn’t one material. PET, HDPE, PVC, LDPE, PP, PS — these are chemically very different polymers with different melting points, different properties, and different processing needs. Mixing them together, even a small amount, degrades the quality of the output significantly. A single PVC bottle in a batch of PET can contaminate the whole load. This isn’t carelessness; it’s chemistry.
Contamination matters enormously. A yoghurt pot with yoghurt still in it, a greasy pizza box, a shampoo bottle that wasn’t rinsed — these don’t just affect one item. They can ruin entire batches at the sorting facility, because organic residue introduces bacteria, moisture, and odour that affect the quality of the recycled resin.
Economics work against recycled material. Recycled PET costs around €1,800 per tonne in Europe. Virgin PET — made from oil — costs around €1,000 per tonne. Until very recently, there was almost no economic incentive for companies to choose recycled plastic unless policy forced them to. The system we built assumed market demand that simply wasn’t there.
As someone who spends their days trying to extract contaminants from water at the molecular level, I feel this viscerally. Purity isn’t just a nice-to-have — it changes everything about what you can do with a material downstream.
What’s Actually Changing (And There Is Real Change)
I promised you honest and balanced, so here it is: some things are genuinely shifting. 🌱
Policy is finally creating demand. From June 2025, EU regulations require higher recycled content in certain plastic products. When brands legally have to use recycled resin, the economics change overnight. Suddenly, recyclers with clean, well-sorted feedstock have buyers. This matters more than any awareness campaign.
Switzerland is restructuring its approach. The new RecyPac system — piloted in Bern and other municipalities in 2025 — introduces a chargeable collection bag for all household plastic packaging. It’s modelled on the “polluter pays” principle already embedded in Swiss waste law. The target is a 55% recycling rate for plastic packaging by 2030. That’s ambitious from a base of 10%, but the infrastructure investment is real.
Chemical recycling is maturing. Mechanical recycling (melting and reshaping) works well for clean, single-polymer streams like PET. But for mixed, contaminated or multi-layer plastics, chemical recycling — breaking polymers back down to their constituent monomers — is increasingly viable, though still energy-intensive. It won’t replace mechanical recycling, but it handles the streams mechanical recycling can’t.
AI sorting is genuinely impressive. Modern AI-equipped sorting plants can distinguish polymer types, colours, and contamination levels at speeds and accuracies no human team could match. This is quietly raising the quality ceiling for recycled material.
So What Do We Actually Do With This?
I’m not going to tell you to stop sorting. Please keep sorting — it matters enormously for the materials where it genuinely works.
What I will say is this: the hierarchy matters more than the bin.
Reduce first. The plastic that doesn’t get produced doesn’t need to be recycled. Choosing loose vegetables, a refillable bottle, a product with less packaging — this is still the highest-leverage individual action.
Reuse second. A glass jar used twenty times is better than a glass jar recycled once.
Then recycle — but sort with knowledge, not just guilt. In Switzerland: glass, PET bottles, aluminium and paper are genuinely worth it and genuinely work. Mixed household plastics are trickier, but the system is improving, and sorting still matters at the margin.
And finally — and I mean this: redirect some of the energy you put into the bin into the policy conversation. The decisions being made right now about extended producer responsibility, recycled content mandates, and plastic production caps will matter infinitely more than whether each individual yoghurt pot was rinsed.
The system failed. The system is what needs fixing. And we’re the generation that gets to push for that. 💚
🌱 Things I’m Loving This Month
🧗🏽Outdoor Climbing Thanks Helo and Sarah for some incredible sessions outdoors and Felix of course for our indoor climbing sessions. Climbing is my escape <3
🍜 Soba noodles with miso + tahini Making this almost weekly, dead simple, incredibly satisfying, and somehow elegant. Reply if you want the recipe.
📖 The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson) Serious, systems-level climate thinking wrapped in fiction. Dense in places. Totally worth it.
🎧 “Soft Place to Land” by Kathleen Edwards For evenings after long lab runs—sounds like it understands.
🇵🇹 Lisbon trip Spent a relaxing few days… incredible. Big thanks to my company who joined on spontaneous short notice!
🛶Paddling on lake Zurich with some incredible company (shoutout to beautiful curly brown hair, infectious motivation, great friends and late night sitting on the docks :-)).
This edition of Fionn’s Green Journey is fully carbon offset, thanks to the amazing support from Atlas Project! Each tree emoji below represents a verified tree planted to offset our digital footprint. 👣
🌟 This Month: A new White Fir has taken root! 🌲
Fionn’s Green Journey Forest
🌲 🌳 🌴 🌿 🥑 🌴 🌿 🌳 🌲 🌳 🥭 🌴 🌴 🌺 🥭 🌲 🥑 🌲
🌲 = White Fir, 🌳 = Black Ironwood, 🌴 = Indian Cedar, 🌿 = Red Mangrove, 🌺 = Pomegranate, 🍋 = Lemon, 🥑 = Avocado, 🥭 = Mango
Watch the forest grow with every edition. Feel free to request exact coordinates 🥾✨
As always — stay curious, stay grounded, and stay on a Green Journey. 💚
— Fionn