Throwing your plastic bottles in the recycling bin may make you feel good about yourself, or ease your guilt about your climate impact. But recycling plastic will not address the plastic pollution crisis\u2014and it is time we stop pretending as such.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Less than 6% of plastic waste<\/a> in the United States is recycled. This number tends to surprise people, in part, because it is a hard truth to accept. We all want a magic wand that can effortlessly eliminate the plastic trail of consumerism. Plus, we\u2019ve been misled to believe that sea turtles would stop choking on our plastic waste if we faithfully chucked it into the recycling bin. <\/p>\n That deception was intentional. Powerful fossil fuel and chemical companies\u2014the ones creating the pollution in the first place\u2014knew as early<\/a> as the 1970s that plastic recycling would never be able to handle the world\u2019s plastic waste. At that time, consumers and policymakers were realizing there were severe environmental consequences to single-use, disposable plastics, and companies were feeling the heat. To prevent their products from being restricted by new laws, companies banded together to plant positive messaging<\/a> about plastic recycling across our society. In the 1990s, television commercials about recycling felt as prevalent as Beanie Babies.<\/p>\n Industry deception continues today. For instance, when you place your old plastic shopping bags in the drop-off bins at grocery stores<\/a>, that packaging often still ends up in a landfill. And the triangular \u201cchasing arrows\u201d symbol<\/a> that everyone associates with recyclability routinely appears on non-recyclable plastic products.<\/p>\n Plastic, which is made from fossil fuels, wasn\u2019t designed to be recycled. Roughly 16,000<\/a> chemicals can be found in plastic<\/a>, many of them purposefully added during the production process to give plastic characteristics like flexibility, strength, color, and resistance to sunlight. Different plastic products contain different combinations of those chemicals, and these varied plastic types must all be sorted and recycled separately.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, plastic\u2014unlike glass and aluminum\u2014loses its functionality when it\u2019s recycled. A glass bottle or aluminum can may be recycled into another glass bottle or aluminum can over and over again. By contrast, a plastic bottle can only be recycled into another plastic bottle two or three times<\/a> before it becomes something like carpeting or clothing<\/a>, which typically ultimately ends up<\/a> in a landfill or incinerator, polluting our air, soil, and water. In this way, recycling doesn\u2019t sustainably prevent plastic waste from ending up in the environment\u2014it just delays it.<\/p>\n Now, from New York<\/a> to California<\/a>, state attorneys general are filing lawsuits against plastic producers like PepsiCo and ExxonMobil not just for their pollution but also their recyclability claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the plastics industry was pulling the wool over our eyes, it was also exponentially increasing plastic production. The result: Plastic waste in the United States rose from<\/a> 13.6 billion pounds in 1980 to 71.4 billion pounds in 2018\u2014a whopping 263% increase.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In less than a century, companies polluted the planet with so much plastic that it has reached every corner of the globe, even the most unexpected places: arctic sea ice<\/a>, the Mariana Trench<\/a>, remote mountains<\/a>, rain in our national parks<\/a>, and, perhaps most alarmingly, throughout our bodies<\/a>.<\/p>\n Microplastics<\/a>\u2014the small bits of plastic that are constantly shedding off plastic products\u2014have been found in nearly every human organ system<\/a>, including the lungs<\/a>, blood<\/a>, brain<\/a>, testicles<\/a>, placenta<\/a>, and breast milk<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Researchers and medical professionals are publishing vital new research<\/a> about what our plastic diet is doing to our bodies. Of those 16,000 chemicals found in plastic mentioned earlier, 4,200<\/a> are known to be harmful to human health or the environment. Plastic and its chemicals are believed<\/a> to be associated with cancer<\/a>, heart attacks<\/a>, hormone disruption<\/a> and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n A study published<\/a> earlier this year in The Lancet found that plastic is responsible for at least $1.5 trillion a year in health-related damages worldwide. Those damages begin at the very start of plastic\u2019s life cycle<\/a>, when fossil fuels are extracted from the Earth, and persist during every subsequent stage of their journey from store shelves, to recycling centers, to their inevitable disposal.\u00a0<\/p>\n So what can we do? If we can\u2019t recycle our way out of this mess,\u00a0and plastic\u2019s environmental and human health harms begin from its very conception anyway, how do we reverse the plastic pollution crisis?\u00a0<\/p>\n First, companies need to stop producing so much plastic and shift to reusable and refillable systems. If reducing packaging or using reusable packaging is not possible, companies should at least shift to paper, cardboard, glass, or metal. These can be made from recycled material and actually get recycled again. Companies are not going to do this on their own, which is why policymakers\u2014the officials we elected to protect us\u2014need to require them to do so. <\/p>\n It\u2019s the only way to ensure people are prioritized over plastic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Throwing your plastic bottles in the recycling bin may make you feel good about yourself, or ease your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[4442,273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":{"0":"post-162915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}