The OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and UNEP (United Nations Environment Program) have been telling us for years that only 5-9% of recycled plastics are actually reused. The rest is shipped, hundreds of millions of tons at a clip, to Africa, Indonesia, South America, and so on—for the poor to ingest. The net effect is to encourage the ongoing manufacture of the same material…forever.
. . . .
I guess I’m left with the notion that those who recycle—and I’ve been guilty—are really hurting others, and that the best way to move forward on a grass-roots level is to stop ignoring the problem—refusing to recycle this stuff—and telling our leaders to confront it head on.
I guess I'm unclear on the proposed alternatives that we want our leaders to impose. Just throw stuff out? It can go into landfills or incinerators, and when there is enough resistance in the US to building more landfills, there will be some poor country willing to take our trash for a fee, just like they now take stuff to recycle. I'm not sure how throwing away even more stuff is better for those other countries than trying to recycle some part of it.
As others have said, the problem is the amount moreso than the "thing" itself -- it's that we generate so. much. crap. that we have to outsource it to other, poorer countries, whether for recycling or disposal or whatever else. And "buy less stuff" has gotten no politician anywhere at any time in history.
You can ban plastics, sure. And then what? We package everything in cardboard? That's not particularly weatherproof, nor is it airtight to slow down food spoilage. It also cannot be recycled indefinitely, and manufacturing more requires a lot of trees and a whole bunch of not-particularly-environmentally-friendly processing. We can use metal, go back to the days of the tin can, but metal is not exactly low-impact itself -- mining, processing, forging, all those necessary steps are fairly dirty businesses, and the transportation isn't exactly impact-free. Plus it is quite a bit more expensive (and it's heavier than plastic, so more fuel for transportation). So now prices rise, and everyone gets voted out of office again.
Every choice comes with tradeoffs. For most of human history, food shortages were the biggest risk. Advances like refrigeration, canning, and, yes, plastics were a godsend to make food less perishable and thus better able to be transported from where it's grown to where it's needed. Plastics have the advantage of being really, really cheap, too. All of that has helped decrease the share of income the average American spends on food quite significantly -- and has allowed access to better-quality food to wider swaths of the population.
Of course, that's not our problem now -- now it's the reverse, we've got waaaaayyy too much crap of all varieties, including food, and we could all do with a lot less. Now we'd probably be better off if we did force folks to use metal, wood, and glass, because higher prices would mean people could buy less crap, so we'd make less crap, and thus generate less waste. Of course, that is also the political non-starter, as this past election demonstrates.
But the point is that if you want to find a practicable solution to a problem, you need to understand why we have this problem in the first place. Plastics were and are useful and cheap, and those needs don't go away just because we know a lot more about the downsides now. So any solution has to figure out how to achieve those same things, preferably with fewer downsides.
My hope rests less in regulation and more in ingenuity. There are folks out there right now working on alternatives -- like the compostable stuff mentioned above. Or one of my clients is testing out a process that would actually break the plastic down into its component chemicals, which could then be used to make new, fresh plastic, without the degradation in quality you get through current re-use options. I hope it works, because it would be massively cool to basically turn plastic back into the raw materials to make plastic. But if it doesn't, there are other ideas. IMO, we should be investing in this kind of research. I mean, just imagine if those giant piles of waste were instead actually useful as feedstock to make something else. Then you solve the waste problem
and minimize the amount of virgin raw materials you need to produce as well.
