#recycling

Lightweight single-use items — carrier bags, food wrappers, cups, cutlery, polystyrene — are easily windblown from bins and vehicles into hedgerows, waterways and the sea, where they fragment and persist. Much of it is hard to recycle even when captured.

Single-use beverage containers — plastic bottles, aluminium cans, glass bottles, and caps — are among the most-collected litter items worldwide and can exceed half of all litter by volume in some surveys, with outsized impact on marine and freshwater debris.

Trillions of cigarette butts are dropped each year and only about a third reach a bin. Their plastic filters leach toxicants and fragment into microplastics over years — making them both the most numerous litter item and a persistent contaminant of soil and water.

Ultra-fast-fashion floods donation banks with cheap blended-fibre garments: a larger share is unsellable and hard to recycle, while item-by-item sorting cost rises. The same tonne costs more to process and yields less revenue, collapsing sorting margins independently of export de

Northern textile collection is funded by exporting the reusable fraction — historically ~half of sorted EU volume — to African markets. That outlet is closing: importing countries increasingly buy cheap new Asian garments instead, and several destinations now restrict secondhand

Clothing banks look free but are secretly funded by selling the reusable fraction, mostly exported. When export demand collapsed and ultra-fast-fashion flooded banks with unsellable items, each container flipped to a loss — causing operators to quietly withdraw, ending the servic

Organic food waste is roughly a third of household residual waste. Mixed with general waste it is heavy, wet and costly to truck and burn. France made household biowaste sorting mandatory in 2024, but curbside bins, routes and treatment add cost that source diversion can avoid.

Refill schemes that lean on consumer goodwill or regulation are fragile: goodwill stays niche, and regulation can be repealed and is fought by incumbents. A refill system only becomes permanent when it is genuinely more profitable for the operator than single-use plastic.

Bulk soap already moves between factories but never reaches consumers without single-use packaging. The last mile breaks on five fronts: contamination in reused containers, reverse logistics to clean them, messy dispensing, variable-quantity retail, and user friction.

Shampoo, body wash and liquid soap are sold almost entirely in single-use plastic bottles that are rarely recycled. The format persists because plastic is cheap, light, unbreakable and water-resistant and supply chains are built around it, so nothing has displaced it.

Terracycle offers free cigarette recycling programs (though only part of the cigarette is recycled or composted).

Make the companies that put packaging on the market pay for its end-of-life and cleanup, and reward less-wasteful designs. Shifts cost and design incentives upstream to the producers who created the litter, rather than onto taxpayers.

Add a small refundable deposit to drink containers, repaid on return. The financial incentive drives return rates above 90% and is the best-evidenced single intervention for container litter, cutting it roughly 40–80% across many jurisdictions.

Set the EPR support per tonne to the measured end-to-end cost of collecting, sorting, and disposing of textiles, indexed to rise automatically when resale revenue falls — so collection is a cost-recovered public service funded by producers, not a bet on the export price.

New York's 1982 container-deposit law was expanded in 2009 ('Bigger Better Bottle Bill') to include bottled water (PET containers). This legislative extension to a new container type provides a replicable model: an exis…

The first US bottle bill, enacted in Oregon in 1971, placed a refundable deposit on beer and soft-drink containers. Within two years total roadside litter dropped ~39% by count, and by 1979 beverage containers had falle…

On 15 July 2025 Le Relais suspended collection across its national network of roughly 22,000 containers — about 70% of France's used-clothing collection — in a funding standoff with the eco-organisme Refashion. The Haut…

When the resale-export collapse pushed French sorting operators toward insolvency in 2024–2025, the EPR-funding lever was used — repeatedly and reactively — to keep the chain alive. Refashion released a €6m emergency en…

The Communauté de communes du Mont des Avaloirs (CCMA), a rural intercommunalité in northern Mayenne, ran voluntary textile collection through containers operated by Le Relais at bring-points. All textile containers wer…