If you think that recycling plastic containers is helping the environments, Consumer Reports has news for you.
The vast majority of plastic containers never get recycled, according to a recent Consumer Reports story.
The fantasy, Consumer Reports says, was made up by the petroleum industry to make you think that buying single-use plastic containers – like water bottles – or using plastic grocery bags – is ok because they will be recycled and used again.
The reality, according to a federal agency, just 8.7 percent of the plastic that was discarded, was actually recycled. The report was based on 2018 date, the latest information available.
“One of four things happens to plastic after you’re done with it. If it’s not recycled—and it’s usually not—it is landfilled, incinerated, or littered,” says the story.
“The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) estimates that in 2018, about 16 percent of U.S. plastic waste was incinerated. A relatively small amount was littered. Most of the rest ended up in landfills—including a lot of the plastic people dutifully put into recycling bins.”
“Plastics are a rapidly growing segment of municipal solid waste (MSW),” says the 2018 EPA report.
“While plastics are found in all major MSW categories, the containers and packaging category had the most plastic tonnage at over 14.5 million tons in 2018.
“This category includes bags, sacks and wraps; other packaging; polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and jars; high-density polyethylene (HDPE) natural bottles; and other containers.
“Manufacturers also use plastic in durable goods, such as appliances, furniture, casings of lead-acid batteries and other products.”
Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who heads up The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit focused on plastic pollution, told Consumer Reports that “plastic products are often made of mixtures of many chemicals, which can stymie recycling processes by making it harder to isolate a base material that can be recovered and reused.”
“Perhaps the most important reason is that there is very little financial incentive to recycle: It’s far less expensive to manufacture most types of plastic from scratch than it is to recycle old plastic into something new.”
“Recycling is sold as a means of not worrying about the problem,” Judith Enck, a former regional administrator at the EPA, now a visiting professor at Bennington College in Vermont and president of Beyond Plastics, a group focused on ending plastics pollution.
“The companies paying for the ads that frame recycling as an easy solution to a potentially devastating environmental problem know that recycling cannot keep up with the flood of new plastic,” Enck told Consumer Reports.
The problem increased exponentially three years ago when China and other countries stopped accepting our plastic goods, other than on that the most pristine sorted plastic.
