Washington, DC, May 28, 2024 --  

Pretending to recycle plastic allows the industry to trash the planet while promising to save it.

As Americans fill their recycling bins with bottles and packages from backyard barbecues, they are dutifully playing bit parts in a performance orchestrated by the petrochemical industry. For over three decades, Americans have been taught to act out a recycling myth: a utopia where plastics are gathered and taken away to be made into new products as the cycle starts all over again.

Except this is all a lie.   The vast majority of plastic is not recycled and never can be. Many of the bottles and packages in your recycling bin will end up in a landfill -- if you are lucky. Some will be shipped to rubbish plants in India or Vietnam and end up burned, or worse, floating in highly polluted rivers and seas somewhere along the way.

It would be an overstatement to say that plastic recycling doesn't happen. It does, but in small quantities totally eclipsed by new production. A 2022 report by the OECD estimated that about 9 percent of all plastics made have been recycled, with about 70 percent ending up in landfills, in the oceans and lakes, or lying somewhere on the ground¹. But even this 9 percent figure overstates the benefit since products made of recycled plastics will themselves be discarded. All of it will end up burned or scattered around the planet.

Not gonna happen © Photo by David G. Young

The myth of recyclable plastic isn't just a little white lie meant to instill good behavior, it is actually outright fraud, designed to enable consumer product manufacturers and the petrochemical industry to boost their profits, deny wasteful practices, and push the ultimate cost of pollution onto others. A February report by the Center for Climate Integrity revealed internal documents from plastic companies showing they have long known recycling was not a viable solution to plastic waste. ²

Although scientifically dubious and practically useless, plastic recycling has been a huge public relations success. Every trip to the recycle bin is is an act of faith that helps perpetuate the system. Feeling guilty about buying orange juice in that big plastic jug? The eggs in the obnoxious plastic clamshell? The dishwashing detergent pods in plastic membranes inside yet another plastic tub? Don't worry -- it's recyclable! It says so right on the package.

Yes, the ubiquitous plastic package almost always has a triangular recycling symbol showing arrows around a number. Each number represents a category of plastics: code 1 signifies polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Code 2 is high-density polyethelene.

Plastics with codes 1 and 2 represent nearly all plastics that ever get recycled -- milk jugs, soda bottles, plastic grocery bags, etc. Yet there are several more codes that can appear inside the symbol that are so costly to recycle that it practically never happens. Yet in service to the big lie, such plastic containers still show the recycling symbol.

What happens to plastics without codes 1 and 2? Recycling facilities simply dump them in landfills or burn them in incinerators. Other plastics get crushed and sent overseas. Much of this went to China until the country banned the import of plastic waste in 2019.³ This led to a crisis where plastic waste ended piling up in American recycling facilities or being sent to the landfills. Today, the waste is sent largely to India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia where regulations are more lax. Some of it may get recycled, but as an ABC News investigation found, some ends up dumped in rivers or burned in garbage heaps.⁴

As China's economy has slowed, the problem has gotten worse. A glut of petrochemical capacity has dropped prices for virgin high-density polyethelene -- the plastic used for single use grocery bags -- so recycling is no longer cost-effective.⁵ Expect more bags and bottles to end up in the ocean.

The latest savior for the industry's mythical world is the "pyrolysis plant" that promises to "recycle" nearly all classes of plastics by converting them in a high-temperature oxygen-free chamber into synthetic oil. But such plants burn 70 percent of the plastic to generate heat and dump 10 percent into landfills as char, making them resemble old-fashioned incinerators more than recycling plants.⁶

Make no mistake: today's plastics industry a dirty business built on dirty lies. Consumer products use plastics in order to save a few pennies versus old-fashioned glass, metal, fabric, paper, cardboard and wood. But these "savings" are only possible by pushing the plastic disposal costs onto third parties -- either municipal governments, developing countries, or the world at large. This rotten system must be brought to an end.

To be sure, plastic is never going to go away -- it is a remarkable material that is highly useful in small quantities for niche applications. But it was a huge mistake to use it on a massive industrial scale, especially for single use items. Reversing this mistake can't come soon enough.

Notes:

1. Business Insider, China Stopped Taking Our plastic. Now America is Drowning in It, April 24, 2024

2. Guardian, 'They lied': Plastics Producers Deceived Public About Recycling, Report Reveals, Feb 15, 2024

3. Business Insider, Ibid.

4. ABC News, Plastic Bags From Walmart US Recycling Bins Tracked to Controversial Plastic Facilities in Southeast Asia, April 23, 2024

5. Financial Times, Petrochemical Glut Makes New Plastic Cheaper than Recycled, January 15,  2024

6. Inside Climate News, A New Plant in Indiana Uses a Process Called ‘Pyrolysis’ to Recycle Plastic Waste. Critics Say It’s Really Just Incineration, September 11, 2022