Stop pretending most plastics are recycled
Every Wednesday, I dutifully take my recycling bin to the curb. Its fill is 80 percent plastics, save for an occasional wine bottle and soda can. This weekly jaunt makes me feel good, but it is a charade: Most of this plastic will be thrown into a landfill.
Plastic is a catch-all name for numerous industrial polymers: polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC, polyesters and many others. Their durability and the vast versatility of their properties made them indispensable in thousands of household and commercial applications. Plastic can be as light as wood, but without rotting or attracting bugs. It can be as transparent as glass without being fragile, and as strong as metal without rusting.
Plastics’ durability also made them the most serious solid pollutant. We annually discard roughly 300 million tons and nature has no way of degrading these artificial materials. An old toothbrush takes 500 years to decompose in a landfill. But so much plastic makes its way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and tissues of most ocean fish.
Recycling was supposed to help. But of all plastic ever produced, only about 10 percent got recycled, a pitiful percentage compared to the recycling rates for aluminum, glass or paper.
Plastic recycling is plagued with problems. The collection and sorting requires infrastructure. Most rural locations, and even many cities do not have curbside recycling. Where infrastructure exists, plastic is collected in a “single stream” with all other recyclables. However, the recyclables are often so soiled that they end up useless.
Because they cannot be chemically or biologically degraded — they are just melted and recast into a new shape. But because they are not a single chemical composition, various kinds of plastics don’t behave when melted together; some often separate like oil and water. The resulting material is much inferior to the original one. A recycled plastic water bottle will never again be transparent, and recycled plastics will never command the price of the freshly produced one; plastic is not truly recycled, but instead downcycled. Aluminum, in contrast, can be infinitely recycled without compromising its properties.
The final problem is the economics and geopolitics. Plastics are produced from petroleum and the collected recyclables compete with crude oil as the starting material to make new plastics. Most of the time, it loses in that competition — not least because the biggest plastics manufacturers are also the biggest oil companies. U.S. plastic waste used to be recycled in China — where low labor costs made a big difference in this labor-intensive industry. But in 2018, China banned the imports of U.S. waste and is unlikely to resume them. Consequently, many U.S. municipalities scaled down their recycling programs and switched to burning their plastic waste or sending it to landfills.
The myth of recyclable plastics did not come about from ignorance or coincidence; instead, it was carefully crafted by the plastics industry, which was long aware of the inability to effectively recycle such a hodgepodge of different materials.
There are efforts to make plastics either more recyclable or more biodegradable. National Science Foundation’s Center for Sustainable Polymers, headquartered at the University of Minnesota, aims to develop such materials. Several such next-generation plastics are in production, but the scale of their production is 100 times lower than that of polyethylene alone. It will take decades for such sustainable plastics to displace the ones currently in use.
The world is choking on plastics. The only way out is to consume less of it. Think about it over that to-go cup.