Fiona Greaney ‘29
Opinions Editor
You stand in Crossroads with two options ahead of you. In your hands lie a brown paper bag, a plastic cup with a lid, and a few disheveled napkins. Two bins stand before you: a black bin and a blue bin. You are an upstanding citizen who likes to do good, so you carefully sort your plastic into the recycling bin. You walk away feeling better about yourself and about the world, hoping that someday down the line you might see that plastic cup again in another form. But the truth is that you will probably never see that plastic cup again, and neither will anyone else. Globally, only nine percent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled. The problem of microplastics clogging marine ecosystems and human brains is not our fault. It is the fault of companies that refuse to clean up their messes.
In the early days of plastic, the substance was marketed as a substitute for uncommon resources like ivory. But companies can make way more money if customers have to buy something over and over again. Marketing plastics as single-use also pushes the financial burden of waste from themselves onto local municipalities and taxpayers. Since then, plastic production has skyrocketed. The world produces over 400 million metric tons of plastic each year. This amount of production is projected to double by 2040, so there is no sign of this stopping. About forty percent of plastic is single-use plastic, meaning that it will never see the light of day again. But don’t you worry—recycling is here to save us all from our plastic-wrapped doom. Or is it?
Plastic recycling doesn’t really happen. Beginning in the 1970s, people started to worry about plastic use. To satisfy consumers’ worries about plastic waste, resin identification codes were added to plastics. In reality, only two plastics (PET and HDPE) are actually recycled at scale. But companies are no longer responsible for this waste. Instead, the consumer carries the burden.
It is cheaper to produce virgin plastic directly than to recycle plastic. This is because plastic basically comes out of the ground for free. Some places, for instance, a barrel of ethane (the source material for plastic) costs less than three dollars. That’s cheaper than a barrel of water. But why is this? Because of a compound called methane. Methane is a main source of heating and electricity generation in the world. Methane has largely replaced coal because it burns cleaner. Good. But in drilling for methane, the industry encountered shale. Shale releases both methane and ethane, whether you want it or not. Only so much can be burned before shutting down production, so companies might as well profit and make it into plastic.
On the other hand, plastic is expensive to recycle. Different colors and kinds of plastic make the process complex and expensive, especially when a plastic bottle can be made up of several different types of plastic. Mechanical recycling weakens polymer chains, which makes plastics only recyclable once or twice. Recycling is usually only downcycling into lower value products like plastic lumber or carpet fibers. And even when plastic is recycled, food residue can easily contaminate entire batches of plastic and cause them to be landfilled. What’s worse is that wealthier nations export their plastic waste to poorer countries like Malaysia and Indonesia to deal with the trash. But when these countries can’t recycle the plastic, it ends up in their streets, in their food, and in their ecosystems.
Millions of tons of plastic enter the oceans each year. These plastics break down into microplastics and end up in our soil, drinking water, and even blood. Incinerating plastics releases greenhouse gases that further warm our planet. These environmental costs are externalized and put onto the most vulnerable populations in the world while companies profit. Even if recycling rates doubled, it would barely make a dent in the total waste because plastic production has outpaced recycling capacity by a long shot.
Long story short: recycling doesn’t work. We need to take away the moral permission slip of recycling given to companies. Extended Producer Responsibility policies need to be stronger. If companies had to pay the true cost for disposal, plastic production would change quickly. The blue bins will not save us. The most sustainable plastic is the plastic that was never made.
Featured image courtesy of Google Images
Copy Edited by Sophia Mariani ’26
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