Recycling is Dead

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.

Here, as revealed by CCI, Irwin Levowitz, who has held several senior roles at Exxon, notes that the company is committed to the activities but not the results.
In short: they knew.

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.

This industry PR diagram shows a closed loop, but loops can be deceptive...

It fails to note that much plastic is not collected for recycling, nor that when it is it may still end up dumped or burned, nor that even if it is "recycled", plastic degrades and is lost in the process - so that there never can be a closed loop.

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.

A pyrolysis plant at Hengelo in the Netherlands

No future for recycling

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:

• plastic that is not recycled or reused (the majority)

• 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

Plastics Europe is the European version of our own UK trade association