Recycling seems to me a fake individual solution to a very real collective problem. As an idea, it facilitates the endless production of plastic trash
www.irishtimes.com
Plastic, which is made from petroleum and gas among other substances, is notoriously difficult to recycle. For one thing, all of the many chemically distinct types of plastic must be carefully separated and sorted, because recycling them together is not possible – obviously a difficult and expensive process. There is, too, a limit to the number of times a plastic can be recycled, because the materials degrade with each reuse; typically, it’s only possible to reuse a plastic once or twice.
The truth is, the vast majority of plastic is not recycled. Globally, 85 per cent of plastic material winds up in landfills; about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste gets added to the pile every year. The plastic that doesn’t make it to those landfills gets swept into rivers, or directly into the ocean. It gets broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, called microplastics, which are eaten by fish and other marine creatures. We know that every single one of us has microplastics in our bloodstreams; we have not even begun to properly understand what this material is doing to us.
This year, the US-based Center for Climate Integrity published a detailed report entitled The Fraud of Plastic Recycling. “Despite their long-standing knowledge that recycling plastic is neither technically nor economically viable, petrochemical companies – independently and through their industry trade associations and front groups – have engaged in fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns designed to mislead the public about the viability of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste,” wrote the report’s authors. The widespread emphasis on and adoption of recycling has allowed the plastic market to expand, while stalling legislative and regulatory action that might otherwise have mitigated plastic waste and pollution.
