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From the Recycling Bin to the Landfill: The Major Flaw in Plastic Recycling

April 4, 2024

From the Recycling Bin to the Landfill: The Major Flaw in Plastic Recycling

Reports estimate that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is recycled, pointing to the impracticality of recycling on a large scale.

People may be putting plastic into recycling bins, but most of it generally ends up in landfills or incinerated.

Yet the demand for more plastic production continues—at a growing cost to human and environmental health—because of the belief that recycling offsets the associated waste and risks. A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) alleges that the plastics industry knowingly caused the current plastic waste crisis.

The nonprofit’s report claims that as the plastics industry faced mounting concerns over plastics being incinerated and piling up in landfills, they promoted recycling as a viable solution while dismissing it internally as impractical.

“They knew since the 1970s that plastic recycling was not going to be scalable and effective in tackling the plastic waste crisis,” Melissa Valliant, communications director of Beyond Plastics, a nonprofit aiming to reduce single-use plastic use and production, explained to The Epoch Times.

The report asserts that the efforts to sell the false promise of plastic recycling were to avoid restrictive regulations and potential product bans.Plastic Recycling Poses Many Challenges

According to the report, one problem with plastic recycling is that it is not technically or economically feasible at scale. Unlike glass and metal, plastic cannot be repeatedly recycled without quickly degrading in quality. Most recyclable plastics can typically only be recycled once. As a result, most recycled plastic eventually ends up in landfills, even if it goes through an additional use cycle as another product.

Between the 1970s and 2015, 91 percent of plastic was either landfilled, burned, or leaked into the environment, according to a global analysis published in Science Advances. Another recent report published by Beyond Plastics estimated that less than 6 percent of plastic in the United States is successfully recycled.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Coles, Woolworths recycling scheme collapses after secret stockpiles revealed

November 9, 2022

Coles, Woolworths recycling scheme collapses after secret stockpiles revealed

Australia’s largest plastic bag recycling program has collapsed amid revelations hundreds of millions of bags and other soft plastic items dropped off by customers at Coles and Woolworths are being secretly stockpiled in warehouses and not recycled.

Instead of being taken to companies that use the plastic to make other items, REDcycle has been transporting the plastic to warehouses for long-term storage in what some experts consider a potential environmental and fire safety risk.

Lucinda Moje-O’Brien routinely recycles her plastic bags at REDcycle supermarket collection points.
Lucinda Moje-O’Brien routinely recycles her plastic bags at REDcycle supermarket collection points.CREDIT:JASON SOUTH

The Melbourne-based company, which claims to collect up to 5 million plastic items a day from public drop-off points at nearly 2000 supermarkets across the country, did not publicly announce the suspension of the recycling component of its program, and has for months continued collecting large volumes of soft plastics including shopping bags, pet food bags, ice cream wrappers, bubble wrap and frozen food packaging.

The plastics collected are usually sent to other companies, where they are used as ingredients in concrete, asphalt, street furniture, bollards and shopping trolleys.

On Tuesday evening, after questions from this masthead, REDcycle announced it would suspend its collection program from Wednesday due to “untenable pressure” on its business model.

Woolworths apologised to customers on Tuesday. Coles declined to comment about when it became aware REDcycle was collecting plastic from its supermarkets that were not being recycled.

A spokeswoman for REDcycle said “several unforeseen challenges, exacerbated by the pandemic” meant that three companies that normally accepted the plastic for recycling were no longer doing so.

The processing problems are expected to continue until mid-2023, which could mean more than 1 billion plastic items – or thousands of tonnes – are stockpiled in warehouses. REDcycle would not reveal how much plastic is currently stockpiled in its facilities.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Plastic Recycling Is a Disaster and a ‘Myth,’ Report Says

October 29, 2022

Plastic Recycling Is a Disaster and a ‘Myth,’ Report Says

Greenpeace warns in a new report that we’ve wasted decades and billions of dollars pretending single-use plastic recycling is feasible or desirable.
Plastic Recycling Is a Disaster and a 'Myth,' Report Says
JUSTIN SULLIVAN / STAFF VIA GETTY IMAGES

A new report from Greenpeace USA paints a dire picture for recycling efforts in the United States: They’ve fundamentally failed.

“The plastics and products industries have been promoting plastic recycling as the solution to plastic waste since the early 1990s. Some 30 years later, the vast majority of U.S. plastic waste is still not recyclable,” the report reads. “The U.S. plastic recycling rate was estimated to have declined to about 5-6% in 2021, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.”

In 2020, Greenpeace USA published a survey of plastic recycling in America that looked at about 370 material recovery facilities (MRFs) as part of a larger survey of America’s capacity for domestic plastic waste reprocessing. One key result was that only some types of plastic containers could actually be recycled—specifically PET#1 and HDPE#2—but that MRFs regularly accepted other types of plastics, then disposed of them because there was no “end-market buyer.” But it gets worse: PET#1 and HDPE#2 are hardly recyclable themselves, falling well below a 30 percent threshold established by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative.

Recycling plastic waste fails for a variety of reasons that Greenpeace boils down to: the impossibility of collection and sorting, the environmental toxicity, synthetic compositions and contamination, and a lack of economic feasibility.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Want to save the oceans? Stop recycling plastic

October 10, 2022

Want to save the oceans? Stop recycling plastic

If you put your plastic in your recycling bin, there’s a decent chance it will end up in the seas off east Asia. If you put it in landfill, it’s going nowhere

This photo taken on May 12, 2018 shows a boy looking out from a window of a house beside a garbage-filled creek in Manila. The blanket of trash on a creek that flows between the makeshift homes of a Manila slum is so dense it appears one could walk across it like a paved street. / AFP PHOTO / NOEL CELISNOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images
Plastic in a river in Manila, the Philippines, where a significant amount of Western ‘recycling’ plastic is sent (Photo: Noel Celis/AFP/Getty)

Recycling plastic is a bad idea and, until we can be sure of where it’s going, we should stop doing it. We should put plastic in the landfill, instead.

This sounds like a really spicy hot take, but it’s not. I think it is pretty much accepted among people who study these things. The oceans are full of plastic, and that’s bad – but none of the plastic in the oceans comes from a British landfill. It almost all comes from developing-world countries, and by recycling we make the problem worse.

About 0.05 per cent of plastic waste in the UK is “mismanaged” – that is, dropped as litter or dumped into the environment, or left in open landfill. By contrast, in India, that figure is over 20 per cent – 400 times higher. China is comparable, at about 19 per cent.

In the Philippines, that figure is about 6.5 per cent, still more than 100 times the UK level but not quite as dramatic. But the Philippines is a collection of small islands, so plastic litter easily reaches small rivers there and ends up in the sea. Malaysia, similarly, has less of a problem with mismanaged waste, but large percentages of what is mismanaged ends up in the sea. So the average bit of plastic in one of those countries is pretty likely to end up in the sea.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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