Why we can’t recycle our way to a sustainable future
It feels so good to put recyclables in the blue bin. But unfortunately, a lot of what’s in that bin ends up in a landfill.
And more importantly, if we just keep recycling too much stuff, we won’t really have done anything good for the planet.
While it’s still important to recycle and build better systems for it, more recycling will not solve plastic plastic pollution or our overconsumption and waste problems. We all know the iconic image of the chasing arrows in a triangle: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Our kids are taught it in school, and today in the United States, more people recycle than vote.
But somewhere along the way, we forgot that the first two R’s - reduce and reuse - are way more important than recycling for the environment. Unfortunately over the last 40 years, we’ve put most of our time, energy and resources into recycling because frankly, it’s the easiest. And it doesn’t threaten the throw-away, disposable paradigm that corporations have built their business models and supply chains around.
But in this case, that easy way out hasn’t worked. Because of the exponentially increasing scale of plastic pollution, and because - when you look at the hard numbers, it’s hard to imagine recycling alone is ever going to be enough. By the plastics industry’s own projections, plastic production is set to explode over the next 30 years, with estimates projecting a four-fold increase worldwide by 2050. With 25-40% of plastic production going to make packaging and half of that going to single-use, this problem is only going to get much worse unless we change course.
The plastics and paper industries have promoted recycling for decades to legitimize the continued sales of single-use products. Combined with support from the environmental community and regulators, focus on recycling and diversion from landfill has turned attention away from source reduction and reuse that would result in far less waste to manage in the first place.
The reality is that there are a lot of myths about recycling that just aren’t true. Read on to learn more.
The crisis: recycling is in trouble in the United States
In the U.S., the only plastic materials that have historically been economically recoverable at scale are clean PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) plastic – mostly bottles.
Laminated multi-plastic and multi-material packaging, such as tetra packs (plastic coated paper cartons) and resin-lined paper cups, are hard to separate and recycle. Small plastic pieces like straws, utensils and bottle caps are challenging to recover and bale and often fall through sorting screens.
As packaging over recent decades has shifted to lighter and harder to recycle plastics, the struggle to maintain recycling programs has increased. Since 2017, the commodity prices on recyclables have declined an average of 41%.
Initial studies suggest that U.S. communities are facing a $2-4 billion shortfall between the costs of collection and sorting recyclables.
The crisis: consumer goods companies and retail food service businesses have failed to design packaging and food serviceware to have value in recycling markets.
The crisis: recyclers need clean, higher-value materials, and they’re not receiving them.
Single-stream recycling, food contaminated packaging and multi-material packaging combined to create “dirty” streams of low value materials for recycling.
Historically, many industrialized countries exported their low-value materials to Asia for recycling. In the U.S., this counted as recycling regardless of the final outcome for the materials. But in 2018, China imposed a ban on accepting imports of other nations’ waste for recycling. Up to that point, China was accepting 45% of the world's plastics, 89% of which were single-use food packaging.
Since China and other Asian countries stopped accepting these materials, waste management programs in cities and towns all across the U.S. started sending contaminated paper and plastic (mostly food packaging) to landfills and incinerators. In 2015, only 9% of plastics produced were recycled. It was projected that in 2019, plastic recycling would drop to 2.9%, in part due to import bans from China and other Asian countries.
In 2020, a glut of oil caused by overproduction made prices for virgin plastic so cheap that markets for recyclable plastics bottomed out. No longer able to sell materials for recycling, many local jurisdictions have to pay to have materials recycled.
With huge budget deficits due to the coronavirus pandemic, many jurisdictions are ending their recycling programs altogether.
Today, most food and beverage packaging either ends up in a landfill, an incinerator, or the environment.
The crisis: the price of virgin gas and oil has plummeted, making the use of recycled materials much more expensive than using virgin materials.
Debunking the myths: recycled materials are not always better for the environment. And more recycling will not solve plastic pollution.
In terms of recyclability, results of over 520 comparisons were basically a wash: 44% of comparisons found significantly higher environmental impacts for recyclable packages while 39% of comparisons found significantly lower (beneficial) impacts.
Recyclable food packaging had lower environmental impacts in only 56% of studies conducted in the last 18 years. Recyclable food packaging is only preferable to non-recyclable products if they are actually recycled. That doesn’t happen often with foodware.
Specifying recyclability as an attribute should be based less on whether something can be technically or theoretically recycled, and more on whether it should be or will be recycled. It is also important to apply the reality test – that is, whether they will actually be recycled in specific jurisdictions.
Recyclability as an attribute does not necessarily mean the package is better for the environment.
For most materials, a product made with recycled content generally has lower environmental impact than a product made from the same material without recycled content, such as virgin glass versus glass with recycled content. This is true for steel, aluminum, paper, and a variety of plastic resins. Increasing the recycled content of a material is almost always good.
However, when comparing different materials within a single-use packaging system (for example, juice delivered in a glass bottle with recycled content, versus a plastic bottle with no recycled content), items with greater “recycled content” are not necessarily the lowest impact option. In 61% of all the comparisons reviewed by Oregon DEQ, the packaging material with higher recycled content often had a worse environmental footprint than a different packaging material without recycled content. The true benefits of recycled content are associated with packaging made from the same materials.
From a health perspective, requiring recycled content in food serviceware can sometimes be problematic, as there isn’t adequate regulation to prevent the use of chemically-contaminated recycled materials. For example, some recycled black plastic used in food containers and utensils contain highly toxic brominated flame retardants that were present in waste plastics sourced from the electronics industry. Even at very low levels of exposure, these chemicals can cause serious reproductive and developmental impacts.
More recycled content isn’t always a good thing.
More recycling will not solve plastic pollution.
Almost all the high pollution plastic products we find in the environment - pretty much everything besides soda and water bottles - have no value in today’s recycling systems. People can’t make money off them and so they don’t collect it. As a result, only about 6.6% of plastic packaging gets recycled.
Even the plastics that do have value still get littered. Plastic bottles, which do have economic value, are still among the top 10 most littered items in beach debris studies.
Focusing on making plastics more recyclable doesn’t mean that they won’t end up in the environment. But we can do better - by getting rid of the unnecessary single-use waste when we sit down to eat, and by helping foster new businesses in creating reusable take-out services.
Only around 6% of plastics are recycled, and more than a third of all plastic packaging produced winds up in the environment.
The benefits of recycling are based on a series of assumptions that may not match the reality of how the system operates and the impacts of the materials that flow through it.
Local solid waste policies often make the mistake of specifying that products be compostable or recyclable, without looking at what happens to these products once they enter the waste stream.
A “reality test” must be applied: do these items get recycled or composted in the local waste stream? In most cases, food serviceware does not.
Bottom line: we need to create solutions further upstream.
Resource Library
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GAIA: Recycling is not enough
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Recycling bias & reduction neglect
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