Crowdscience

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It’s a well-known phrase that we all try and follow in our day to day lives. But are our current recycling habits the best they can be? It’s a hot topic at Crowdscience - multiple listeners have contacted Crowdscience with questions about the ins and outs of recycling. We follow one listener’s food waste to a processing plant to investigate whether or not it could be processed in our own homes. But aside from the food waste, what about the containers it comes in? We investigate if food containers really need to be cleaned before we put them in recycling bins, or if that just wastes water. Recycling processes differ all over the world, so we hear from reporter Chhavi Sachdev in Mumbai, India, who follows her plastic waste to find out how plastic sorting and recycling is a whole economy of its own. But new technologies have meant that biodegradable and bioderived plastics are starting to appear in our packaging, and one Crowdscience listener wants to know which is better for the envi