Recycling Isn't Going to Stop Plastic from Destroying the Earth

Today, most people are familiar with curbside recycling in which local governments or private companies gather a neighborhood’s recyclable products, take them to facilities, sort them, and reintroduce them into the system. But despite the establishment of these recycling efforts decades ago, only 9% of all the plastic produced since the 1950s has been recycled, and the United States recycles and composts just 34.7%. What doesn’t get recycled can end up in dumpsites, landfills, or incinerators, which use heat to burn waste and release carbon dioxide into the environment. Although incinerators are believed to follow a “waste-to-energy” model by generating electricity, environmentalist organizations argue that they create a higher demand for waste and pose health risks due to high emissions of pollutants.

The supply of plastic has skyrocketed in the last 60 years, too. The global production of newly manufactured virgin plastics jumped from 2 million tons in 1950 to 381 million tons in 2015, and companies like ExxonMobil Chemical and Shell Chemical are investing in new facilities that will reportedly increase plastic production by 40% in the next 10 years. These plastics, which can take around 450 years to decompose and release greenhouse gases if exposed to sunlight, are of immediate concern to environmental advocates.

Although the blame for pollution is often placed on consumers of single-use plastics, experts like Wilson and Martin Bourque, executive director of the Ecology Center in Berkeley, California, highlight the role that corporations play in environmental degradation. In hundreds of cleanups and brand audits led by the Break Free From Plastic movement, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé were found to be the top plastic polluters worldwide.

“A lot of the problem with what we call contamination in recycling is people hoping or thinking that something is recyclable or being told by the manufacturer or the brand owner, the company that they’re buying from, that it’s recyclable,” Bourque tells Teen Vogue, “when in fact there isn’t any good way or any economic way to recycle the product or the packaging that’s being sold.”

A member of The Arctic Sunrise holds up a partially broken down plastic laundry basket that was pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 2018.

By using the recognizable recycling symbol, he says, many companies push the idea that their products are OK to consume because they’re technically recyclable, even though the infrastructure or market to recycle them may not exist. Multi-layer packaging, like in disposable coffee cups or health-bar wrappers, is especially problematic because it’s the combination of different materials that would need to be separated — a complicated and time-consuming process — in order for the products to get recycled.

“Ever since I was little, I was always told that recycling is the best thing I could do to save the environment. But in reality, it's just another way neoliberalism places burdens on the individual rather than the systems that are responsible,” Mishka says. “In short, recycling is another way to live a more sustainable lifestyle with a smaller eco-footprint, but individuals recycling isn't going to stop the problem.”

Because not all local facilities have the capacity to recycle certain types of materials, much of U.S. waste gets shipped to other countries. According to a report by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), the U.S. is the largest national exporter of plastic waste worldwide. Until recently, China was the top importer, but in January 2018, the country implemented a ban on plastic scrap imports to de-escalate pollution. The result has been waste buildup in many Western countries as well as the rerouting of their pollution to Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia. Beyond creating environmental disasters, plastics prove to be a political issue, too.