“The United Nations estimates that humans produce 400 million tons of plastic waste every year.”

                                                ~ Susan Shain

“Plastic recycling only exists in the minds of public relations agencies that are promoting plastics,”

~ Judith Enck, former E.P.A. official and founder of Beyond Plastics

I’ve pretty much quit trying to interpret the little triangles on various products. We recycle much of our waste and have a compost bin/pile to capture anything readily biodegradable. However, without my glasses I find it hard to read the small numbers in their triangles, and don’t really know what they mean if I could. If in doubt, I usually put it in the recycling bin, and let the recycling facility decide if it’s suitable. I know that’s not the best approach, but I feel it’s better than just trashing everything.

Reporter Susan Shain tells us, “More than a third of the world’s plastic is used for packaging. And many of the largest makers of consumer goods have promised their packaging will be 100 percent recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025 … Many manufacturers, reluctant to give up the cheap, long-lasting and versatile material, see it differently. They argue that the focus should not be on what currently isn’t recycled, but instead on what could be recycled, if only enough money were devoted to educating consumers and expanding infrastructure.”

She also reports on investigations by NPR and “Frontline,” “the industry knew most plastic would not be recycled. The industry says the numbers were solely meant to help recyclers sort different types of plastics, but the chasing arrows surrounding them became a de facto, if fallible, marker of recyclability to consumers.”

She notes, “Why say, because it can’t be recycled today, we should stop claiming it to be recyclable,” said Matt Seaholm, president and chief executive of the Plastics Industry Association, “when we actually can invest and improve the infrastructure to get to where it needs to be?”

So, according to the plastics industry, it may be recyclable someday, so we should just assume that it’s correct to call it recyclable today. “In a recent memo, the E.P.A. recommended that a material be marketed as recyclable only if it has a ‘strong end market,’ meaning it’s sold at a price that’s higher than what it would cost to simply throw it away. The chasing arrows symbol, the agency said, ‘does not accurately represent recyclability, as many plastics (especially 3-7) do not have end markets and are not financially viable to recycle.’”

Shain notes, “Unlike paper, glass or aluminum, plastics are incredibly diverse. Each type of plastic has its own mix of resins, colors and toxic chemicals. A hard-plastic orange laundry detergent jug and a clear squeezable ketchup bottle “can never get recycled together,” Ms. Enck said, because the resulting material would be useless.”

Years ago, I became interested in the burgeoning recycling industry, and since I was working on projects related to new and old landfills, I thought that maybe it made sense to excavate landfills to recover the metals and anything else recyclable. In particular, for the older landfills, most of the organics would have degraded into something like soil (potentially reusable), and much of what’s left would probably include various metals (tin cans, iron, etc.). At that time, the recycle market wouldn’t support the costs of excavation and recovery, although there were quite a few landfills across the country that excavated their older sections to recover the ‘dirt’ to use as cover for the newer parts.

Newer landfills are constructed to eliminate moisture, which slows down or stops the degradation of organics and contain various materials and chemicals that would be dangerous to contact and might complicate re-disposal. The lax landfill acceptance criteria up into the 1970’s also contribute to uncertainty about landfill contents. Of course, the economic and manufacturing boom after WWII resulted in a proliferation of various chemicals in products, including plastics, so landfill contents deposited from WWII though the mid-1970’s could contain all kinds of nasty stuff better left alone. This makes recovery projects very expense and increasingly unlikely.

The better way to address the waste/recycling issue is to address it at the point of manufacture. Per Shain, under a new California law, “manufacturers will be forced to shift to materials that are reusable or actually recyclable.“

Activist Jan Bell saysshe’s “a fan of paper because its production isn’t the result of fossil fuel extraction, because it can be composted or recycled, and because to her knowledge, she said, ‘a paper straw has never killed a sea turtle.’”

Additional information:

Susan Shain, Can Plastic Recycling Ever Really Work?, Sept 3, 2023, The New York Times

Steve Tarlton, Recycling or Decycling?, August 10, 2023, Writes of Nature