Study identifies consumer confusion caused by inconsistent recycling logos
Friday, August 3, 2018 - 15:18:01
Product packaging has become much easier to recycle in the past decade, with many retailers and manufacturers adding information about which parts of boxes, bottles and containers can be processed sustainably.
However, a new survey from Which? has shown that the lack of consistency in the way in which recyclable packaging is labelled is leading to confusion amongst consumers, according to the Guardian.
Close to 50 percent of people questioned in the study said that they believed the pair of intermingled arrows often found on packaging were an indicator that the material could be recycled. In reality, this logo simply shows that the producer has invested in a project which promotes recycling itself, rather than having anything to do with the container.
Further uncertainty arises from the fact that even objects which are recyclable and display the traditional three arrows looping in a triangle are not necessarily capable of being processed by the local facilities available in the UK.
Furthermore, there are multiple versions of this arrow logo, with the green colour option showing a 75 per cent acceptance rate and a black colour variant indicating a lower average acceptance rate.
Just six per cent of respondents to the report said that they understood what a recycling arrow with a line through it meant, which is an issue since this shows that the packaging is not currently recycled by 80 percent of local authorities around the UK.
Clearly there is a lot of variation and fragmentation in this market, with some manufacturers adding their own recycling logos to packaging which, in turn, have to be deciphered.
Experts argue that the best option is to move towards a simpler system that leaves less room for ambiguity, as well as promoting any changes to consumers so that there is no confusion in future.
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