Most plastic waste can’t be turned into new products. Is it time to give up on recycling?
How much plastic do we toss out?
The U.S. generates about 48 million tons of plastic trash every year; globally, the figure is estimated at 400 million tons. And only a tiny share of the plastic bottles, bags, and packaging that we use gets recycled. Worldwide, about 9 percent of that waste is transformed into new items; in the U.S., it’s 5 to 6 percent. The rest is dumped in landfills or incinerated, or ends up littering oceans, beaches, and other parts of the landscape, where this hardy material—it takes at least 400 years to decompose—fragments into smaller pieces known as microplastics. Those plastic particulates have been found in Arctic snow, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. The dismal recycling figures aren’t due to lack of will or low compliance with recycling mandates, but because recycling plastic is inherently problematic. “Most plastics are not recyclable,” said Judith Enck, a former EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics. “And you know who has known this for years? The companies that make and sell plastic.”
Why is it hard to recycle?
Plastic, which is made from fossil fuels, comes in hundreds of varieties. An orange Tide jug and a clear Pepsi bottle contain different polymers, chemical additives, and colorants that can’t be recycled together. That makes sorting out the many types of plastic and melting them down expensive and energy intensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, and so sturdy bottles and containers are typically “downcycled” into lower-grade products such as trash bags. Only about 1 percent of the plastics ever produced have been recycled twice. “It is cheaper to just make a new plastic product than to collect it and recycle it or reuse it,” said Kristian Syberg, who studies plastic pollution at Roskilde University in Denmark. “That’s a systemic problem.” Critics of plastic recycling say the roots of that problem go back to the 1950s, when the plastics sector embraced a growth strategy that has helped turn it into a $700 billion industry.
What was the new strategy?
Turning plastic into a disposable good. For the first half of the 20th century, the new plastics created by chemists were mostly used to craft durable products: Bakelite replaced wood in radios, for example, and polyethylene Tupperware replaced glass and ceramic containers. But in 1956, Modern Packaging editor Lloyd Stouffer told an industry conference that the “future of plastic is in the trash can.” For plastic sales to really boom, he argued, the industry should focus on single-use plastic bottles, jugs, tubes, and other packaging. The idea caught on, and by 1963, Stouffer was celebrating that “the happy day has arrived when nobody considers the package too good to throw away.” Plastic production exploded, going from 1.7 million tons in 1950 to 110 million in 1989. As plastic swamped landfills and piled up on streets, it fueled a public backlash. Facing threats of state and federal regulation, the industry landed on a solution: Promote recycling.
How did it push that message?
In 1984, petrochemical companies and bottlers formed the Plastics Recycling Foundation. The trade group rolled out the three-arrows “recyclable” logo, lobbied governments to create curbside recycling programs, and launched ad campaigns. “A bottle can come back as a bottle, over and over again,” read one. But documents and statements by former industry executives reveal this was done with full knowledge of recycling’s limitations. Recycling plastic is “costly” and “infeasible,” wrote scientists in an industry-commissioned report in 1973. At a 1994 trade meeting, an executive with oil giant Exxon Mobil—the world’s largest producer of plastic polymers—said a common form of chemical recycling was a “fundamentally uneconomical process.” In September, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a first of its kind lawsuit against Exxon Mobil, alleging the company waged “a decades-long campaign of deception” on plastic recycling. The company led consumers to believe recycling could solve the plastic-waste crisis, said Bonta, even though it “clearly knew this wasn’t possible.”
How has the industry responded?
Exxon says California is simply trying to “blame others” for the state’s ineffective recycling system. And the industry as a whole is pushing back on efforts by states and local governments to phase out single-use plastics, saying that a new process known as advanced recycling will be able to handle all plastic waste. In advanced recycling, heat or solvents are used to break down plastic to its basic molecular building blocks, which can then be made into virgin-grade plastic. The industry is “on the cusp of a circularity revolution,” said the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group. But Jennifer Congdon of Beyond Plastics said much of what’s produced in advanced recycling isn’t new plastic but rather fuel to be burned. “It’s like a fancy way to incinerate without saying that you’re using an incinerator,” she said. Congdon and other critics also point out that the industry has spent millions of dollars on advanced recycling plants that have either closed or are operating at a small fraction of their touted capacity. Meanwhile, global plastic production, which doubled over the past 20 years, is on track to nearly quadruple by 2050. There’s only one solution to that looming wave of trash, said Enck: “making less plastic.”
What’s in a (recycling) label?
When can a plastic item fairly be called recyclable? That’s a matter of debate among plastic executives, environmentalists, and regulators. For decades the familiar three-arrows recycling logo has been stamped on single-use plastic items, with a number from 1 to 7 indicating plastic type. But only those marked 1 and 2 are commonly recycled. And environ- mental groups say including the logo on unrecyclable products gives consumers false reassurance they won’t go to landfills. Starting next year, California will prohibit companies from putting the symbol on products that aren’t commonly recycled there; lawmakers in six other states are considering similar laws. Nationally the Federal Trade Commission is preparing to update its Green Guides, which set guidelines for sustainability claims. Calling widespread use of the symbol “deceptive,” the EPA has asked the FTC to limit it to products likely to be recycled. But manufacturers argue they should be free to label as recyclable anything capable of being recycled, no matter how low the likelihood. Jan Dell, founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup, says barring that practice would send a worthy message. “When they fully admit, Oh, we’re selling plastic trash,” she said, “that will motivate them to make changes.”
