Plastic Recycling Doesn't Work and Never Will Work

 

[T]he plastics industry has waged a decades-long campaign to perpetuate the myth that the material is recyclable. This campaign is reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s efforts to convince smokers that filtered cigarettes are healthier than unfiltered cigarettes.

The above quote is from Judith Enck and Jan Dell's article in The Atlantic and lays it all out fairly straight forwardly.

We use too many man-made polymers.

Man-made polymers are bad for us.

They can't really be recycled.

I'm pretty sure that Everything Into Oil was nothing more than a pipe dream.

Waste Land - NPR article

Source - https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

I will admit that I am 100% confused by recycling at this point.

I think I can recycle paper, cardboard, glass, and aluminum pretty well. 

I take my aluminum cans to the local animal shelter where they supposedly make some cash from them.

I put my glass, paper, and cardboard (after tearing out the plastic windows in envelopes and tearing off as much sticker waste from the cardboard as I can) into my curbside bin.

But the plastics mystify me.

My local waste collector - Rumpke - says they can take, "Plastic Bottles (empty, crush, reattach lid): Bottles and jugs that have a small mouth and wider base, such as milk jugs, soda bottles, laundry detergent bottles, water bottles, shampoo bottles and contact solution bottles".

When I called them a couple of years ago and asked what they could take, the customer service person - clearly reading from a manual because she couldn't answer follow-up questions - told me they could take "#1-7 except butter tubs." 

#1-7 is pretty much everything, and I know flatly that they can't take styrofoam (foamed polystyrene - #6).

And now I see that Planet Money has posted a twenty-four minute story (audio and transcript - there's also a 4-minute summary from NPR) relating the history of the Resin Identification Codes (RICs) and the plastics industry's efforts in the 1970's to advertise their way out of plastic's imaging problem. Instead of finding ways to recycle plastics, they convinced us to feel better about plastics by letting us think they were making recyclable products.

Which was apparently crap.

But now they've promised that they're really going to recycle plastics going forward.

SULLIVAN: These days, Larry [Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry] spends a lot of time biking past the ocean. He's become deeply worried about its future, what it will look like in another 20 or 50 years, long after he's gone. And he thinks back to those years he spent at fancy hotels and conference rooms with oil and plastic executives. And he says what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should've been obvious all along. He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, as much virgin oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition. 

THOMAS: They were not interested and still aren't interested, as far as I'm concerned, in putting any real money or effort in the recycling because they want to sell virgin material. Nobody is producing a virgin product and wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material - that's their business. Every year, they want to say they produced X number of million more pounds because that meant their business was growing. 

SULLIVAN: And it is growing. We're making more plastic, buying more plastic, using more plastic. That's not going to go away anytime soon. But as the industry dusts off their new ads and makes their new promises, there is one difference. The difference this time is whether or not the public will still believe them.

The afterlife of plastics

In 2003 I read an article titled "Anything Into Oil" from Discover magazine. That article described a process through which effectively all trash (other than heavy metals) was going to be recycled into usable oil of various molecular weights.

That's it, I thought, no more trash. We're done. We've got that whole trash problem licked. All the landfills can be dug back up and run through the Anything-Into-Oil-er machine to make profit. Step two had finally been solved.

Two years later...update... two more years later...another update...

Flash to seven years later than that and I'm still sending my trash to Mount Rumpke.

Along comes "The Afterlife of Plastic" from Al Jazeera in which we get to read about a new plant opened up to turn plastic into oil. Some of the details are simplified a bit...

Plastic is usually made by heating crude oil, cooling it and adding preservatives so it is able to hold its shape. It can then be molded into light, flexible forms for use as shopping bags, takeout containers or plastic toys.

I'm all in favor of the recycling of plastic and keeping microscopic bits out of the oceans and everything, but I've been hearing promised solutions to the intractable problems with plastics for a decade now.

Don't toy with my emotions here, folks.

Thanks, by the way, to Brian Wright for passing this link along.