A new law came into effect on January 1, 2021, that was a welcome change for anyone (almost everyone) bewildered about how to sort out rubbish in Belgium: all plastics could be tossed into the blue bag.
Until then, there was a lengthy and contentious list of rules of what you absolutely could not put into its sky-coloured bulk. Yoghurt cartons, yes. Yoghurt pots, no. Soda bottles branded with a PET number, OK. Can’t find the PET number? Better not. My personal favourite was the rule that the top of the bottle be narrower than the bottom.
The blue bag now feels like my best friend, easing the guilt inflicted by bringing all that plastic packaging into my home. Plastic bags can go in there! Deodorant cans – even if they are just as big at the top as the bottom! And possibly the gravest thwart to environmental sustainability the world has ever known, coffee capsules.
It’s not just me who is enamoured with all the new possibilities of the bag for PMD (which stands for Plastics, Metals and Drink cartons). Eurostat reports that in 2022, the latest year for which figures are available, 54.2% of plastic packaging put on the market in Belgium was ultimately recycled.
This is up from 49% in 2021 and a significantly lower 45% in 2020. It is the second-highest rate in the 36 European countries reporting – bested only by Italy by just 0.4 percentage points. Belgium’s figure not only exceeds the EU’s target of 50% by 2025, it is close to the 55% target for 2030. For metal packaging, Belgium is third, with more than 96% being recycled.
Bin men picking up the blue waste bags in Brussels
And get this: when paper, cardboard and glass are added to the mix, Belgium tops the chart with 80% of all household packaging being recycled in 2022.
“We have a collection scheme that is really very efficient,” says Mik Van Gaever, Chief Operating Officer of Fost Plus, the Ghent-based facility for blue bags. “In Brussels, the blue bags collected from the streets are delivered to a transfer station in Forest, where they are weighed. Then we take over. We load them into 90 cubic-metre trucks, and they head out to the sorting centre in Ghent. Ten trucks a day, sometimes more. They arrive and dump them into a big hall; it’s a sea of blue bags.”
Belgians sometimes say that the only things that serve them all are a monarchy and a football team. But this is not so. The organisation of the recycling process, including the contents of the blue PMD bag, is handled by Fost Plus, which operates in – believe it or not – the entire country.
Life cycle responsibility
Van Gaever has worked for Fost Plus for 26 years – first straight out of university with a degree in bioengineering, then again after a stint at another company. “It’s my passion,” the 53-year-old says. “When I graduated, Fost Plus had only been around for a few months. I knew it was a gamechanger.”
Fost Plus began treating the blue bag soon after it opened the plant in 1994. You could say the contents of the blue bags were a large part of the reason for the launch of the whole company. It all started – as so much does – with European legislation, specifically the principle of extended producer responsibility (EPR). This is the policy-making producers responsible for the entire life cycle of their products, including collection, recycling and disposal.
“It means that companies are responsible for the environmental impact of their packaging,” says Van Gaever. “Once you drink a soda, the bottle becomes waste. In the 1990s, people just threw it in the bin. But Europe said that’s no longer the way we are going to do it.”
The EU Waste Framework Directive, which came into force in 2009, states that companies putting packaging on the market are responsible for reaching target recycling rates. “This was a revolution,” he says. “This would not be footed by taxpayers or arranged by the public sector. It was up to industry to organise it – and pay for it.”
If Van Gaever’s look is low-key – a crisp, white dress shirt and barely visible glasses – his delivery is not. His recall of dozens of figures is impressive, and he does not leave my understanding of the recycling process to chance – detailing procedures, materials and decades’ worth of legislation from memory. He waves his arms emphatically, more than once bumping the lamp behind him in a glass-enclosed conference room at Fost Plus headquarters in Evere, in the Brussels region.
While the company is rightly thought of as the nation’s recycling service, its money comes from industry. Any company putting packaged products on the market in Belgium can become a member of Fost Plus, and most of them do. Why? Because companies are required by law to report to the government every year how much of their packaging is being recycled. While reporting the amount of packaging they are sending into the market is easy enough, knowing how much of it is being recycled is nearly impossible.
Lorry picking up all the plastic rubbish
Fost Plus does the reporting on behalf of its members as a whole. Member companies report to Fost Plus how much of every very specific type of packaging they put on the market. Fost Plus weighs all the different fractions of plastics and metals that arrive from the sorting centres. Then it calculates the percentage based on tons of material recycled compared to tons of material put on the market.
Of course, some recyclables getting chucked into the PMD bag originate from companies that are not members of Fost Plus. But not much. Fost Plus’s 4,900 members make up some 83% of the Belgian market. Members are local affiliates of major multinationals like Coca-Cola, Unilever and Huawei, along with big Belgian companies such as Ecover, Inex and Forté Pharma. And then there are thousands of medium and small, local producers of goods – from hardware to fashion to frozen food.
Belgium’s packaging commission “has to report our figures to Europe as well as the companies who are not members of Fost Plus,” Van Gaever explains. “And we have also what we call free-riders. These are companies that do not join Fost Plus and that do not report their figures to the government. They just stay under the radar and don’t pay.”
Free-rider contribution to packaging and recycling is estimated and, together with Fost-Plus members and non-members, the figures are supplied to the European Commission. That’s where the 54% recycle rate comes from. But it’s possibly too conservative. Fost Plus’ figure for the recycling rate among plastic packaging contributed by its members is in fact 68%.
New facilities
As the EU’s targets grew, so did the need to incorporate more materials into the PMD bag. And Belgium’s targets are even more ambitious than the EU’s. Before 2020, Belgium told Fost Plus to reach a 65% plastics recycling rate (relative to its members) by 2030. It has already exceeded this goal, but the effort was gargantuan.
“We knew that we were going to have to focus on a whole range of plastics,” says Van Gaever. “We had to collect everything in order to have a remote chance to reach 65%. And then we’d have to convince 11 million people to put everything in the blue bag.”
That last part, as discussed earlier, was easy. Getting every kind of plastic packaging sorted for recycling was another matter.
Turns out, Belgium did not have the facilities to do this. In fact, nowhere in Europe had the facilities for it. So a call for tenders went out, inviting European companies to build more comprehensive sorting facilities in Belgium. The sorting facilities were built over three years as the “throw everything in the blue bag” system was rolled out. Van Gaever smiles. “It was a hell of a job.”
Belgium now has six state-of-the-art sorting centres for the contents of the PMD bag – three in Flanders and three in Wallonia – which sort, crush and bale all that waste. All of Brussels’ blue bags go to the biggest sorting centre, PreZero, in the harbour area of Ghent. It handles 85,000 of Belgium’s total 300,000 tons of PMD waste every year.
Conveyer of plastic death
Witnessing the life cycle of a plastic bottle from when it gets dumped on a conveyor belt in the massive cavern that is PreZero to when it is spat out into its fraction at the end is, to paraphrase Van Gaever, a hell of a thing.
First, everything goes through a giant, spinning sieve so the smaller bits – like the coffee capsules – fall away. The rest then moves through a tunnel, where the lighter plastic bags (including the blue bags) are literally hoovered up.
Next, steel-based tins fly up and land on a strongly magnetic belt that curves upward away from the stream that continues to where optical sensors identify drink cartons, which are extracted via spurts of compressed air. A magnetic current separator takes care of the aluminium and then you’ve got heavier plastics left over. “The reflection of infrared lights is different depending on which kind of PET it is,” explains Van Gaever. “The computer gives instructions to air nozzles to eject the bottles at the right time.”
Sorting of PMD, P+MD in Willebroek, Flanders
Once all is said and done, there are 16 flows of separated waste. At the end, workers give it all a once over. “Maybe they see an opaque bottle where only clear bottles are supposed to go. Or a plastic film that should have been sucked into the vacuum but wasn’t. We still need the human brain to get us through the last mile. We need top-quality sorted material in order to go on to the next step.”
Next stage
So what is the next step? To the recycling centres, of course, where all that stuff actually gets recycled.
Belgium has six new recycling centres for plastic, some of which had to be built to recycle the additional kinds of plastics going into the blue bags. Again, the level of automation is astonishing.
Let’s look at that bottle of water you drank a few weeks earlier. Together with thousands of other bottles made up of the same plastic components, it is shredded before going into what amounts to a giant washing machine. The plastic flakes are then melted at 250°C, causing degasification, which removes impurities.
The melted plastic is pushed through a fine sieve to remove remaining impurities, and then it's pushed through another, larger sieve, resulting in plastic spaghetti (I’m not being clever here – the industry actually calls them spaghetti).
The dried spaghetti is cut across to get granules, and there’s your ready-to-use plastic. “They have huge silos full of perfectly transparent recycled PET granules,” Van Gaever says. These are sold to plastics manufacturers when the entire cycle starts all over again.
Best in class?
Being a proud Ghent native, I’m chuffed that the biggest sorting centre is in my neighbourhood. I also want to hear that Ghent residents are the country’s greatest recyclers. They aren’t. They do fine, but Namur stands out as the king of recycling, with an average of 30kg of PMD per resident per year being collected.
Who’s at the bottom of the class? Well, Brussels, at about 17kg per person per year. But Van Gaever is loathe to give me the names of the best and worst cities, not least because he says the reasons are complex.
No one knows this better than Alain Maron, Brussels Region’s Minister of the Environment and Cleanliness. “Many factors can influence waste collection performance for the blue and yellow bags,” he tells me, pointing to a study carried out by the capital’s research-action project Citizen Waste. It lists several barriers to separating all that household waste that are specific to the capital. A big part of it is “a lack of space for sorting and storing waste until it is collected,” says Maron. “We have small homes, small kitchens, no balconies and a lack of bin space in apartment blocks.”
Bales waiting to be sent to the recycling centre.
Both Van Gaever and Maron also note that language – the ability to understand all those sorting instructions – can be a hindrance. There’s also, says Maron, “a high rate of arrivals and of homes occupied by tenants and insufficient accessibility to sorting facilities.”
But his administration is committed, he says, to improving the situation. “We have put in place the first concerted public cleanliness strategy in Brussels in 30 years – clean.brussels. Brussels needs to produce less waste – some 500,000 tonnes of unsorted waste is burnt every year.” The region means to reduce that by 30% over the next five years in part by making businesses more responsible for waste production and management, introducing a ban on single-use plastics in public administration and making it compulsory for everyone to sort organic waste.
But Brussels is not holding the country back when it comes to being the master recyclers in Europe. “We are at the head of the pack,” Van Gaever says. “As Belgians, we are quite modest, but we can say that the system that has been installed is really one of the most performing, cost-efficient systems in the world.”
