Corporate evil has a fairly predictable playbook that was developed by the tobacco industry starting in the 1940’s. The oil industry picked it up in the 1970’s and birthed the climate change denial that now infects both of the dominant political parties in the US. Oil industry lies have stymied effective action on climate change, and also contributed to the lead poisoning of virtually every person who was alive between 1944 and 1996. When the plastics industry saw a wave of pushback coming from environmentalists in the 1970’s (based on the extremely slow breakdown of plastics in the environment), they, too, chose the path of deception.
We now know that plastic recycling doesn’t really work. There are two big problems. The first is that plastics are incredibly diverse in composition; there are at least a thousand different types. These differences are significant, so proper recycling would require us to sort it into different, specific types. The second issue is that plastic recycling costs significantly more than it costs to simply make new plastic. As a result of these two factors, very little plastic is actually ever recycled.
The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.
To be clear, most plastic is exported to other countries where it is sorted by people making very little money, and less than half of that probably ends up being recycled. Anything with food in it, for example, is considered to be “contaminated” and is sent to a landfill; it is not cleaned and recycled.
In addition to the recycling problem, there’s also the issue of toxicity. Plastics contain toxic additives which are released during the recycling process, but those toxins are released into our bodies as well through contact with our food. Research indicates that people are ingesting about 5 grams of plastic each week –about the volume of a credit card. Unfortunately, plastic (unlike glass) is not an inert material. In addition to the effects of the physical particles on organisms, they also contain chemicals that are directly harmful to our bodies, like bisphenol-A (BPA), whose effects include:
- Cancer
- Infertility
- Damage to Babies
- Reduced Brain Function
- Heart Disease
- Diabetes
Roughly 81% of Americans have detectable levels of bisphenol-A (BPA) in their urine. Thanks to campaigns bringing attention to the dangers of bisphenol-A, plastic manufacturers have substituted other chemicals, like BPS and BFP, but those may actually be worse. The substitution is based on the schemes of the marketing department, not on medical research.
My perspective on this is that plastics should only be used on durable goods that will not come into contact with foods and then should be considered to be a method of carbon sequestration when those durable plastic goods reach the end of their useful lives (rather than converting it to fuel). Such limits to the use of plastic would dramatically shrink the plastic industry which is worth about $600 billion globally and is expected to increase to $810 billion by 2030. That financial growth will be accompanied by the same relative growth in the amount of plastic waste.