Recycling is a lie
Recycling is a false solution that has been promoted by the plastics industry to enable unsustainable levels of production. Not only this, but major industry figures have been fully aware of this duplicity for years. Big plastic continues to push recycling as part of the solution.
What you ought to know about recycling
Below are some of the findings of a major 2024 report by the Center for Climate Integrity. We won’t replicate all the arguments of a lengthy report on this small page, but here are the key takeaways.
- The vast majority of plastic either cannot or never will be recycled. In the US the rate of recycling is 5-6%. This is because:
- There are no products to be made out of some kinds of plastic
- There are too many types of plastic, and many products are made of combinations of plastics, or plastics with other materials like paper, metals and adhesives
- Plastic degrades over time. So recycled plastic loses the qualities that made it valuable in its primary state.
- It is full of toxic additives that are leached during recycling. PFAS chemicals are one of the groups of greatest concern.
- Recycling is more expensive and less efficient than making primary plastic
- Plastics companies deliberately created the narrative of “recycling”.
- They did so because otherwise widespread bans of unsustainable and poisonous materials would have become likely.
- Companies have ever since made ambitious commitments to recycle percentage amounts of their production. They then back down on, or scale down, these ambitions as the date approaches.
- The industry at large creates trade associations and other “front groups” to continue to push the recycling agenda.
But aren’t recycling rates high in the UK?
In the UK, it is impossible to really know how much of our plastic is recycled. Our government claims that it is around 45%. Yet this is not truly verifiable, since much of our waste is shipped abroad (with correspondingly huge emissions tolls) where it is frequently mismanaged. Under 10% is recycled in the UK itself. And, of course, these stats don’t include plastics that never make it into the waste “recovery” system.
Meanwhile, the reality at recycling centres is that extreme pressure and a lack of oversight means that recyclable rubbish is liekly to be mismanaged. In an Unearthed report for Greenpeace and the Telegraph, workers sent apparently recyclable waste the way of landfill and incineration.
So as we can see: a limited amount of plastic is sent to be recycled. But, for the reasons we saw above, this is not a circular, efficient, or clean system. In the best of cases, it delays the eventual incineration or pyrolysis (see below) of the materials.
Advanced/chemical recycling and pyrolysis
In recent years, as the narrative of recycling has been exposed to the light and begun to be debunked, the industry has begun to push a new agenda. The clarion cry now is one of “chemical recycling”, sometimes called advanced recycling. For the largest part, this actually means making the plastic into fuel, which is another way of burning it. (1-14% of plastic recovered for this kind of recycling is suitable for making into new plastic.)
This equally spurious technology involves using heat or chemicals to break plastic down into its constituent elements. These can then be used to make more plastic or as fuel. Breaking plastic down for fuel is called pyrolysis.
Some plastics lobbyists indeed talk about the “recovery” of plastic. The British Plastics Federation, which has lobbied the government against reductions in plastic production, claims that 86% of plastics are “recovered” in the UK. This is because a large amount of what is collected is burned as fuel.
Pyrolysis – Incineration by another name?
Pyrolysis is extremely inefficient, creating an easily-contaminated fuel that has to be mixed with other petroleum products.
It is polluting, potentially producing 100x the pollution of plastic production, and a widely held concern is that pollutants aren’t being measured properly. A major criticism levelled at a pyrolysis plant in the USA is that it’s simply unimaginable, due to the variety of plastics in mixed plastic waste, that they will ever achieve an “optimal stream of plastic waste” suitable for pyrolysis. For example, contamination from plastics like PVC leads to the risk of emitting dioxins.
Pyrolysis, then, is like primary oil and gas a way of burning petrochemicals for fuel that is highly polluting.
Despite these concerns, it is in truth where a huge amount of our plastic is now headed. In Europe, 67.5% of post-consumer plastic now goes to landfill and energy recovery.
No future for recycling – by any name
Could recycling work ever for us? Fundamentally, plastic is a product with a linear lifecycle. From the moment of polymerisation, we are given a product which has begun to degrade and lose its quality. In order to make it desirable and useful, it requires mixing with additives – everything from plasticisers to colourants. Recycling, even when it is efficient, always leads to the loss of microplastics, and often to the leaching of some of these toxic chemicals. It is inherently non-circular.
The challenge for campaigners, scientists, and citizens, is to find the antidote to an industry narrative of “circularity” that is continually reinforced through lobbying, advertising, and the funding of research; and which is being shifted onto ever-changing mechanical and chemical technologies. If we cannot break this narrative, the consequences will be a continued toxic and waste buildup.
If you want to see the problem, you need look no further than the industry-made diagram to the right.
Notice the everything that is missing from this diagram, which would ruin its circle:
- the plastic that is degraded and lost in recycling, and the toxic additives leaking into the environment
- the vast majority of plastic going into pyrolysis and depolymerisation that is actually being burned as fuel, just like primary fossil fuels
- the landfills, oceans and soils where mismanaged and excess plastic has been piling up for decades, and which will never be recycled at all
