Should you even bother throwing plastic in the recycling bin?
Thank you for carefully rinsing, sorting, and recycling your plastic containers — but plastic is trash and trying to recycle it is futile, Greenpeace said in a bombshell October 2022 report. Greenpeace and other environmental groups have been warning about the petroleum and chemical industry's "greenwashing" of plastic recycling for years, while those chemical companies insist we're just on the cusp of a major breakthrough that will make recycling and reusing plastics feasible and cost-effective.
Consumers, meanwhile, are stuck in the middle. Is recycling plastic just a feel-good charade we should stop bothering to play-act, or is there some utility in keeping up the plastic recycling stream?
What does Greenpeace's report say?
U.S. households produced about 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, and only 2.4 million tons of that was recycled, Greenpeace USA said in its report, "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again." That means only about 5% to 6% of U.S. plastic waste is recycled, down from a peak of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018, before China stopped accepting America's plastic refuse for either recycling, burning or dumping.
Some types of plastic, identified by a resin ID code number on the packaging, are recycled at higher rates. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), resin No. 1, commonly used for bottled beverages, and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), No. 2, used for milk jugs and shampoo and detergent bottles, are recycled at rates of 20.9% and 10.3%, respectively, Greenpeace says. But every other type of plastic falls below 5%.
"The data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable," Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA senior plastics campaigner, said in a statement. "More plastic is being produced, and an even smaller percentage of it is being recycled. The crisis just gets worse and worse, and, without drastic change, will continue to worsen as the industry plans to triple plastic production by 2050."
Why can't we recycle plastic?
Most plastic actually is recyclable, but the current process requires a lot of energy, produces pollutants, and often costs more to turn into something reusable than just using virgin plastic. A recycling company has to want to buy what we discard, and "there are some plastics that exist in the waste stream that don't have a market," said Joaquin Mariel, commercial director of Balcones Recycling, one of two materials recovery facilities (MRFs) contracted by Austin, Texas. He singled out plastics with No. 3, 6 and 7.
What Greenpeace means when it says plastic isn't recyclable is that to meet the definition of recyclable used by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastic Economy (EMF NPE) Initiative, an item must have a recycling rate of at least 30%. Not even the most recyclable type of plastic meets that threshold in the U.S., according to Greenpeace.
Most experts agree with Greenpeace's broad point about the gross insufficiency of plastics recycling, but not everyone found its methodology sound. The 2022 study looks at "all types of plastic waste," and its 5% figure is "not representative" of residential recycling programs, Mariel told Austin NPR station KUT. "Things like plastic tubing and piping, industrial plastics, auto, plastics, computer plastics," and other plastics don't end up in the blue recycling bins. Greenpeace's report "twists data to such a degree" it ended up printing "numerical falsehoods," Dan Leif, a "long-time supporter of Greenpeace," elaborated at Plastics Recycling Update.
The Federal Trade Commission's "Green Guides" use a different measurement of recyclability, where you can label something "recyclable" if 60% of consumers have access to a recycling facility that can recycle the item. Under that definition, PET and HDPE bottles and jugs qualify as recyclable. Yogurt containers, plastic cups, plastic plates, and other common products don't come close to that 60% threshold, though, and "just because people have access to PET and HDPE recycling facilities doesn't mean that those products are actually getting recycled," The Verge noted.
How are we supposed to know what plastic to try to recycle?
Thanks to the localized nature of recycling in the U.S. and lax federal standards, "it's nearly impossible to say which items are actually recyclable," Robert Gebelhoff argued in The Washington Post. The 1-7 resin ID code and chasing-arrows triangle symbol were developed by the plastics industry, not the government. Some "people see the recycling symbol and assume or hope the item will be recycled somehow," and "this 'wishcycling' contaminates the waste stream," he wrote. Others "find the labels so confusing that they simply don't recycle anything."
The Environmental Protection Agency is working with the FTC to update and clarify the Green Guides, and its main recommendations are to "have the chasing arrow symbol decoupled from the resin identification codes" set a very high labeling bar so a "recycler has to be able to reliably find a market for that material, in order for it to be marketed as recyclable," Jennie Romer, EPA lead for pollution prevention, told Inside Climate News.
Doing that "would likely disqualify all but a few plastic products from bearing the recycling symbol, which would likely anger many businesses," Gebelhoff said. But "the government's goal should be to move the onus of figuring out recycling away from consumers and onto industries," and as an added benefit, "forcing companies to be honest about whether their products are recyclable could spur innovation to make that the case."
For now, avoid putting plastic bags and food wrappers, plastic mailing envelopes, plastic silverware, garden hoses, coffee pods, and most plastic cups and lids in the blue recycling bin. It's generally safe to recycle milk jugs, soda bottles, and any other "No. 1 and No. 2 bottles and jugs, because those are worth the most money on the commodities market," Romer said.
What happens to the unwanted plastic we throw in the recycling bin?
"It's not going to a recycling facility and being recycled," Trent Carpenter, the general manager of Southern Oregon Sanitation, told NPR. "It's going to a recycling facility and being landfilled someplace else because [you] can't do anything with that material." Plastic waste is also sometimes burned, releasing toxic fumes, and some of it ends up in the ocean, where it degrades and leeches out microplastic particles that are shown up in fish, birds and humans.
"We had to re-educate individuals that a great deal of that material is ending up in a landfill," and people did not want to hear it, Carpenter added. "Politically it's easier to just say 'Gosh, we're going to take everything and we think we can get it recycled,' and then look the other way," but "that's greenwashing at its best."
Could plastic become practically recyclable?
The plastics industry keeps saying yes. "What we are trying to do is really create a circular economy for plastics because we think it is the most viable option for keeping plastic out of the environment," Joshua Baca, vice president of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council trade group, told The Associated Press. "I think we are on the cusp of a sustainability revolution where circularity will be the centerpiece of that," he added. "And innovative technologies like advanced recycling will be what makes this possible."
The "advanced recycling" he refers to is also called chemical recycling, and some large plastics companies are sinking significant resources into building large plastic recycling plants. "The main chemical recycling technologies use pyrolysis, gasification or depolymerization," AP reports. "U.S. plastics producers have said they will recycle or recover all plastic packaging used in the United States by 2040."
"Our mission is to solve plastic pollution," said Jeremy DeBenedictis, president of Alterra Energy, which runs the largest plastic recycling plant in the U.S., in Akron, Ohio. "That is not just a tagline. We all truly want to solve plastic pollution." Alterra turns about 75% of its plastic waste into a synthetic oil solution that can be shipped to petrochemical plants to make new plastic products, while 15% is transformed into fuel to run the process. DeBenedictis said he's licensing Alterra's technology because that's the "best way to make the quickest impact to the world."
Greenpeace, in a May 2023 report, said recycling plastic actually makes it more toxic due to waste-stream contamination and the heating process.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin announced the creation of a new enzyme in early 2022 that breaks down PET plastic in as little as 48 hours, dissolving "everything from water bottles to clamshell packaging for food," graduate student Daniel Acosta told Atlanta's WSB TV. The new enzyme, FAST PETase, was created using artificial intelligence.
The FAST PETase enzyme is still in the lab-testing phase. But being able to break apart PET to its starting material and building it back again "would allow us to fully recircularize and we'd have no need then to have to remake (plastic) from scratch," UT chemical engineering professor Hal Alper said at South by Southwest in March 2023. "What if we made all the PET on the planet that we need to make already?" He said FAST PETase could start to eat away at the mass accumulation of plastic waste, even microplastics, in the oceans and landfills.
Is cutting back on plastic a realistic possibility?
It is the only realistic possibility, Greenpeace argues. "The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill," Greenpeace's Ramsden said. "This isn't actually a new concept — it's how the milkman used to be, it's how Coca-Cola used to get its beverages to people. They would drink their beverage, give the glass bottle back, and it would be sanitized and reused."
The huge plastic users — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé and Unilever — should voluntarily do this, or they can be compelled to do it, Ramsden said. "We are at a decision point on plastic pollution. It is time for corporations to turn off the plastic tap. Instead of continuing to greenwash and mislead the American public, industry should stand on the right side of history" and support a proposed Global Plastics Treaty "that will finally end the age of plastic by significantly decreasing production and increasing refill and reuse."
At the same time, plastic has undergone an "extraordinary evolution as a material" since it was iconically pilloried in Mike Nichols' 1967 classic "The Graduate," John Seabrook wrote in The New Yorker in 2010, near the peak of plastic recycling. "In the film, 'plastics' is understood to mean a cheap, sterile, ugly and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition," he wrote. Now, plastics are "moving ever higher in art and design, to say nothing of medicine."
Kate O'Neill, a professor at U.C. Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the author of the book "Waste," has come to believe that chemical recycling has to be part of the solution to the world's plastics crisis, even though saying so will "piss off the environmentalists," she told AP. "With some of these big problems," O'Neill said, "we can't rule anything out."
Is it worth the bother to throw plastic in the recycling bin, then?
Evidently, "for a long time now, there's been no difference between separating, rinsing out and recycling that plastic juice bottle and simply tossing in with the rest of your household trash," Tom Wrobleski sighed at the Staten Island Advance. We need to do something, but clearly "being green turns out to have been a lot harder than they told us."
"I know this can feel demoralizing because it can seem that recycling is pointless," John Oliver said in a "Last Week Tonight" segment on plastics in 2021. "But it's important to know that it's not. We should absolutely keep recycling paper, cardboard and aluminum — and even recycling plastic, while it may be 90 percent more pointless than you assumed, can still have modest environmental benefits."
It's important to know and follow your local recycling rules, the EPA's Romer said. But "even more importantly, when you're shopping, really focus on reducing and reusing materials before recycling. The most effective way to reduce waste is not to make it in the first place."
Update Aug 8, 2023: This piece has been updated throughout to reflect the latest developments
