The plastic curse

IN the days leading up to the start of the now currently underway COP27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, two interestingly contradictory publications found their way to my inbox. The first was a lengthy (147 pages!) report by the World Bank Group that presents a comprehensive “road map,” to use the term popular here, for creating a circular economy with plastic. The second was a report released by Greenpeace on October 24 that offers the discouraging assessment that, not only is most plastic not being recycled, most plastic cannot be effectively recycled, therefore implying that any notion of a “circular economy” is nonsense.

Greenpeace is largely correct, and it is bad news for the world in a couple of ways.

Ever since the 1970s, when concerns about the environmental impact of human pollution first started to lead to real action to combat it — even before the idea of “climate change” entered the public consciousness — recycling is the one common ground where industry and environmentalists could meet. From industry’s point of view, promoting recycling was an easy social responsibility win, and an aspect of product life from which some tangible financial gain could be extracted. From the environmental perspective, anything to help clean up the planet is a good thing, and being able to convince industry to “change its image” and apply its vast resources to developing new, less harmful products and recycling technologies was real progress.

Of course, through the years recycling has also become a bone of contention, with many companies being accused, sometimes accurately, with employing “recycling” as more a greenwashing buzzword than an actual process. For example, a common complaint is that producers will label products with the ubiquitous recycling symbol without actually bothering to develop or support any sort of recycling program, passing responsibility for it on to the consumers. Nevertheless, a great many enterprises did get on board with the recycling idea, to the extent that recycling is considered the default method of disposal of many products — paper, glass and metal products are recycled in vast quantities, something the Greenpeace report highlights.

Plastic, however, is an altogether vastly larger and more complex challenge. All recycling is energy-intensive, but paper/ fiber, glass and metal recycling uses about the same amount of energy to recreate products of like quality to the originals, with somewhat less residual waste, so the trade-off is valid.

Not so with plastic; plastics are more complex chemical products, and when they are recycled — which, as it turns out, is not that often — they use as much energy and produce as much residual waste as manufacturing “virgin” plastic products, but invariably are of lesser quality or utility. For example, high-density plastics can be recycled into lower-density products, but low-density products are difficult to upcycle into higherdensity ones; it’s not impossible, but is so uneconomical that it’s more sensible — even from an environmental standpoint — to simply manufacture new ones.

And there is a growing body of evidence that many recycled plastic products are actually more harmful to humans than the originals. A research study published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials in May and cited by the Greenpeace report found that recycled plastic products tested for “food contact chemicals” had significant levels of antimony, acetaldehyde, and socalled endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which include different types of phthalates, bisphenol A (BPA) and cadmium, among others.

Bursting a bubble

The ambition to promote a “circular economy” with plastic is essentially based on the idea that most plastics are not recycled but they could be, and if they were it would create a new economic chain. As further icing on the cake, this would also help to meet goals of economic and climate action inclusiveness by formalizing the already vast underworld of “waste pickers” that exists in less-developed countries (such as this one).

The focus of COP27 is on financing climate action, putting money where the world’s mouth has been with unfulfilled pledges over the past seven years since the 2015 Paris Agreement. A form of climate action that at least hypothetically offers some kind of value creation and mitigates the perception of climate action as being all cost — i.e., the “circular economy” — fits right in with COP27’s aims, which is likely why the World Bank released its report

when it did. The Greenpeace report, however, which is not the only such report, but perhaps only the bestpublicized, sticks a very large pin in that balloon.

So now what? For Greenpeace’s part, it makes a couple of recommendations to “mitigate the systemic problems associated with plastic recycling,” including phasing out single-use plastics, mandating the use of standardized reusable packaging, and adopting a Global Plastics Treaty that would establish international standards for plastic lifecycle management.

These are all worthwhile suggestions, but Greenpeace falls into a trap that seems to be common in most efforts to address plastic pollution, which is to treat plastic packaging as the only, or at least the biggest, problem. The same criticism has been made, quite correctly, about the recently enacted Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Law in this country. Plastic is everywhere, and unless those who sincerely wish to reduce its harmful effects on the planet can wrap their heads around how big the problem actually is, any effort, while still being wellintentioned and worth pursuing, is going to have results that fall short of expectations. The only solution, ultimately, is to develop more sustainable materials that can completely replace plastics. We will never know until we try, of course, but at this point, that does not even seem like an imaginable possibility.