Recycling Plastics Is Massive Failure

Sihanoukville, Cambodia                                                          Niamh Peren/The Guardian

Americans generate 34.5 million tons of plastic waste every year.  That's 69 billion pounds of waste or to make it more personal - that's just over 200 pounds of plastic waste per year for every man, woman and child in the United States.  Of that total, only 9% is recycled - and over half of that is being shipped to other countries.

...China and Hong Kong handled more than half: about 1.6m tons of our plastic recycling every year. They developed a vast industry of harvesting and reusing the most valuable plastics to make products that could be sold back to the western world.

But much of what America sent was contaminated with food or dirt, or it was non-recyclable and simply had to be landfilled in China. Amid growing environmental and health fears, China shut its doors to all but the cleanest plastics in late 2017.

The waste problem has become so acute that after China began to refuse our trash, many other countries tightened their standards as well.  Leaving the waste to be shipped to the poorest countries with the lowest standards.

The Guardian found that each month throughout the second half of 2018, container ships ferried about 260 tons of US plastic scrap into one of the most dystopian, plastic-covered places of all: the Cambodian seaside town of Sihanoukville, where, in some areas, almost every inch of the ocean is covered with floating plastic and the beach is nothing but a glinting carpet of polymers.

The entire concept of recycling is more to assuage the conscience of American consumers than to reduce the amount of plastic being produced and discarded.  Only a tiny fraction of the millions of tons of plastic waste will find its way back into the supply chain.  The vast bulk of the material ends up in landfills in some of the world's poorest countries. 

It’s a familiar scene: you stand at the bin, trash in hand, and wonder: “Can I recycle this?”

We tend to throw it in the recycling bin anyway, in the hope that some unknown person, somewhere else, will sort it out. Recyclers call this aspirational recycling, or wish-cycling.

So, what's the impact of your plastic waste?

A study released this spring by the environmental group Gaia documented the human toll of US plastics exports on the countries that receive them.

“The impact of the shift in plastic trade to south-east Asian countries has been staggering – contaminated water supplies, crop death, respiratory illness from exposure to burning plastic, and the rise of organized crime abound in areas most exposed to the flood of new imports,” the report found.

“These countries and their people are shouldering the economic, social and environmental costs of that pollution, possibly for generations to come.”

The petrochemical industry (all the major oil companies) see plastics as their hedge to a world filled with electric and alternate fuel vehicles.  The more single use containers the world consumes, the better for their bottom line.  

The only solution to a world choked with plastic is to stop using so much of it.  

The Guardian will be reporting on this issue in depth all week and throughout the year.