Why Recycling Plastic Doesn’t Solve Plastic Pollution

Recycling plastic doesn’t solve plastic pollution. It’s dangerous to thinking that it does. It gives people the impression that “it’s okay to use plastic because I recycle it”. That simply keeps the plastic problem going. Yes, imperfect action is better than no action, but refusing and reusing plastic is infinitely better.

Here are 5 reasons recycling plastic is not a solution to the plastic problem.

1. Recycling plastic is a challenging process in itself

Plastic recycling is a very complex process. That’s why recycling recommendations vary in different locations; it depends on the capabilities of recycling plants in an area. Not all plastic can be recycled at a given plant.

Before they can be recycled, plastic have to be sorted manually. This is because different plastic (No. 1 to 7) represents different resin with different melting points. Also, if they’re dirty, they can’t be recycled.

Contamination can render an entire batch unusable.

With hundreds of thousands of households recycling plastic, we can all imagine how time-consuming and difficult the process must be.

If a plant gets plastic they don’t have the capability to recycle, these either gets discarded or transported to another recycling plant – further increasing the carbon footprint and price of recycled plastic.

This is a problem because the price of recycled plastic is crucial in determining whether they would be used in place of virgin plastic.

2. Profit over environment: Virgin material can be cheaper than recycled plastic

The most common use of plastic is for packaging – making up 25% of the 245 million tonnes of plastic that are used annually worldwide.

Globally, humans buy 1 million plastic bottles per minute, making PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles the second largest contributor of plastic used for packaging. In contrast, the 6 biggest soft drink companies in the world use only an average of 6.6% of recycled PET.

That means an average of 93.4% of those bottles are made from virgin material!

It gives us an inkling that recycling isn’t working as well as we imagined it would. Why is that so? Well, as a result of lower oil prices, virgin plastic can be cheaper than recycled plastic.

For the sake of profit, most companies gravitate toward using virgin plastic over recycled plastic. This tendency is unlikely to change unless laws are passed to mandate companies’ use of recycled plastic, or if consumers boycott their products.

We can recycle to our heart’s content, but a significant amount of new plastic will still be used for packaging. Besides, recycled plastic has its problems.

3. Recycling downgrades plastic = down-cycling

Though it is possible to recycle plastic bottles back into plastic bottles, few plants have the capabilities to do it.

When plastic is recycled, their structure becomes weaker. As a result, most plastic are down-cycled into fiber for clothes, fleece, fluff for insulation, park benches, carpeting or drainage pipes etc.

Even then, the quality of recycled plastic is often not good enough for even textiles. So companies blend new plastic with recycled ones to form stronger fibers. In fact, most textiles are still made from virgin materials.

Down-cycled items can’t be recycled more than once and would end up in landfills or incinerators.

4. Not all plastic can be recycled

• Globally, we use an estimated 4 trillion plastic bags per year globally. These are often not accepted by curbside recycling and can only be recycled at special facilities.
• Styrofoam (expanded polystyrene) can only be recycled at certain plants.
• In the US alone, 500 million straws are used and thrown away each day. Straws are not recyclable.
• Clothes blended with other material, e,g, polyester with spandex, can’t be recycled.
• You can never tell if #7 plastics (“Others”) are recyclable. This includes nylon, acrylics, melamine, bioplastic and etc.

This’s a short list but it illustrates the limitation of recycling for plastic.

Obviously, when a plastic product can’t be recycled, it’ll be thrown away at the end of its use.

What about plastic that’s hard to recycle? I suspect most people who can’t recycle an item in their area would throw it away. Regrettably, I’m one of them.

5. Recycling plastic doesn’t solve the over-usage problem

In just 60 years, our actions have put 8.3 billion tons of plastic in landfills, the ocean and all over our surroundings. But we don’t need numbers to know we’re overusing plastic.

Everywhere we look, whether at a supermarket or at home, we see things made of and wrapped in plastic.

How much petroleum does these number translate to? Is it realistic to think that we have the capability to recycle all the plastic we use?

Plastic are not infinitely recyclable. Even if we recycle everything we use, they eventually end up in the landfill, where it’ll linger for 500 years. Or in the incinerator, where it’ll burn and pollute the air with greenhouse gases.

We’re still going to “lose” a substantial amount of it in the ocean, where it’ll continue to harm marine life and destroy its ecosystem.

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The takeaway

Recycling plastic does extend the resource and beats just throwing it out, but it can also do so much.

Apart from it being a resource intensive process, it also doesn’t remove the need for more virgin material.

In the end, plastic invariably ends up in a landfill, an incineration plant or the ocean.

To truly understand the wastefulness of that, remember that plastic is made from petroleum. It is a fossil fuel – a non-renewable resource that took millions of years to form. Once used, it’s gone for ever.

To squander petroleum on single-use-plastic and almost disposables (like poorly made fast-fashion clothes and cheap storage containers that break with several uses) is like burning money in the fireplace for warmth when you can use firewood.

If we think that we can alleviate the environment crisis by recycling plastic, we will lose the fight. Recycling plastic doesn’t solve plastic pollution!

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Better solutions

The most effective solution would be to have laws and regulations in place. Many countries have banned the use of plastic bags. France is aiming to stop all production of single-use plastic by 2020. Taiwan is aiming to ban single-use plastic by 2030. It is possible.

But it’s also crucial that companies work towards a circular economy model – where they design their operation process to optimizes the use of resources and minimize waste before it happens. The current economy model simply isn’t sustainable, especially with the global population growth.

At the same time, sustainable alternatives to plastic have to be invented. After all, plastic use is in almost every part of our lives. It shows that there is a need for a material like that, it just shouldn’t be plastic.

As consumers, we can also do our part.

• Talk about the impact of plastic pollution and the insufficiency of plastic recycling as a solution to spread awareness.
• Refuse: Think about ways to reduce your reliance on plastic. Use reusable containers, utensils, cups, tumbler, straws and bags to avoid using single-use plastic.
• Reuse: Reuse the plastic containers and bags you have, or find ways to repurpose them.
• Recycle: when the first 2 Rs fail, that’s when we recycle (if we can).

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Plastic waste and pollution is a huge problem, but we’re all in it together, and we’ll try to solve it together. Maybe there’s still time, maybe we’ve run out of time. Either way, we have to try!

Let me know what you think!

I hope you’ve found this post informative. If you want to read more posts like that, be sure to check out this one!