Of the record volumes of plastic being produced, less than 10% is made into something new. Is it time to rethink recycling?
It is often said that the world can’t recycle its way out of the plastic pollution crisis. And statistics underscore the reality of that statement.
To date,less than a tenth of all the plasticever made has been given a new lease of life. And just 1% has been recycled twice.
The rest ends up in landfills and incinerators. Or it lands in the environment, contaminating soil, air and the oceans — which take up roughly one garbage truck of plastic every minute.
“Just because something is recyclable doesn’t mean it’s getting recycled,” said Moritz Jäger-Roschko, a plastics expert at Greenpeace Germany. “Currently, it is simply cheaper to just make a new plastic product than to collect it and recycle it.”
Not all plastics are equal
One of the main hurdles to greater re-use is plastic type. Of the thousands out there, some, like cross-linked polymers, are hard to handle.
“Recycling doesn’t really work in the mechanical sense because you cannot split them up and bring them back into their original state,” said Marc Kreutzbruck, head of the institute of plastics engineering at Germany’s University of Stuttgart.
But being robust, durable and heat-resistant, they are exactly the type of plastics used in aerospace, electronics and automobiles.
“Everything in transportation that is focused on lightweight construction relies on these kinds of plastics,” Kreutzbruck added.
Hazardous chemical additives
Another major sticking point is that plastics are often custom formulated with additives that make them more flexible, stronger or cheaper to produce.
Sarah Perreard, co-director of global Plastic Footprint Network coalition, said the number of additives that have been invented and used in the past decade “has increased drastically.”
“We have almost created this sort of monster that we don’t fully control anymore,” Perreard said.
The problems are as complex as the plastics themselves. Firstly, many additives are hazardous to both human health and the environment and can leach out during recycling or even during use in recycled products. And recycling streams contaminated with hazardous additives can be flagged as toxic waste by regulatory agencies, making re-use more complicated or even illegal.
Equally, when recycled together, additives can mix unpredictably and degrade the quality of end material, making it unattractive to manufacturers.
