“Recycling” plastic is a meaningless move

It’s time to stop “recycling” plastic. Plastic as a material is not recyclable and the best thing we can do to celebrate Earth Day this year is to acknowledge that fact.

As writer Eve O. Schaub writes in an article in the Washington Post, “This seems counterintuitive, I know. We’ve been told for decades that the answer to the plastic waste crisis is to do more, better recycling: If only we could do better sorting! I wish we had better access to recycling technologies! If only we washed and dried our plastics better! All of this is a smoke screen, designed to distract us from the truth that plastics recycling – if by ‘recycling’ we mean the conversion of a used material into a new material of similar value and function – is a myth.”

As Schaub adds in her article, “unlike paper, glass and metal, plastic is not easily and efficiently converted into new products. What is brought to us for ‘recycling’ plastic is costly, energy consuming and toxic. In addition, the process requires the addition of a staggering amount of new virgin plastic – about 70% – to hold the newly formed plastic object. As a result, only about 5% of plastic is ‘recycled’ (or, more accurately, ‘recycled’ into an inferior product). And this, while paper and cardboard are recycled at a rate of 68%.

Considering that, as a society, we’ve been actively trying to get better at recycling plastics since the 1970s, 5% represents a colossal, clear failure. It tells us that “recycling” plastic is, at heart, an empty gesture.

Many environmentalists will protest this claim. They could rightly point out that plastics with a resin identification code of 1 or 2 (the number inside the triangle of “hunting arrows” on many plastics) have a higher recycling success rate: around 30%. Shouldn’t we support recycling at least this plastic?

For a long time I thought so.

But this brings us to another myth: that plastic is harmless to human health. What many people don’t know is that plastic is made up of two components: fossil fuels and toxic chemicals. When we say toxic chemicals, we’re talking about some pretty bad guys: heavy metals, PFAS, flame retardants, and persistent organic pollutants. Tens of thousands of proprietary chemical formulations are involved in the production of plastic, most of which have never been tested for their effects on human health.”

As the Washington Post article adds: “This means that even if we were to get better at recycling plastic, we shouldn’t want to. When you grind, melt, and reshape a bunch of plastic (by adding lots of new virgin plastic to bind it together), all of those thousands of toxic plastic chemicals combine to create a material Frankenstein that has what scientists call ‘unintentionally added substances’ in it. Which means chemicals that aren’t supposed to be there start showing up. A study last year concluded that recycled plastics contain ‘an unknown number of chemical compounds in unknown concentrations’.

The result; You don’t want your food wrapped in recycled mystery plastic. But what if we only use recycled plastic for non-edible items like picnic benches? Next, we have one more highly worrying aspect of plastic to deal with: microplastics. Lately we’ve been hearing more and more about them, because scientists are finding them everywhere they look – in the environment and in the human body.

The chemical makeup of all plastics – whatever the type – is a synthetic polymer that never breaks down or goes away. Instead, it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces until it turns into microplastics or even nanoplastics. These tiny particles are still plastic, still toxic, but now so small that we eat and breathe them all the time. Microplastics have been discovered in human lungs, bloodstream and breast milk, as well as in the placenta of unborn babies. Scientists have found microplastics in semen, testicles and the brain.

The effect of all this plastic on our bodies is still being discovered, but we know it’s substantial. A recent study concluded that the burden of disease from plastic exposure includes premature birth, obesity, heart disease and cancer, and the cost of healthcare was $249 billion in 2018 alone. The human body has become the addict’s garbage can. in the plastics of our culture.

Trying to recycle plastic makes the microplastics problem even worse. A study of just one plastic recycling facility found that it can wash 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater each year – which end up settling in our city’s water systems or being released into the environment.”

As Eve O. Schaub adds in her Washington Post article, “Right now, we all have microplastics running through our bodies. This is not the fault of insufficient recycling. This is because of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can least harm people.

Right now, this place is the dump. And then we have to start working on the real solution: to do it much less.”