‘Recyclable’ does not equal ‘recycled’
Thankfully, there is a sign with three chasing arrows on my water bottle — now when I dispose it, it’ll become another product instead of just waste. Right?
Think again. Just because that plastic bottle is ‘recyclable’, doesn’t mean it will be recycled. Contrary to popular belief, plastic bottles does not magically disappear once it’s thrown into the bin. Not all of them are used again, and definitely not all of them are turned into other products.
After a long and exhausting journey — originally crude oil extracted from the ground with mega machinery, transported to be cleaned at a refinery, transported once again to a factory to be made into plastic pellets, then heated and shaped into bottles, transported to another factory to be filled, and finally, transported to your local convenience store where you purchase it, drink from it, and throw it away almost immediately — most of these plastic bottles just end up in the landfill.
If you chose to ‘recycle’ your bottles, they take another long and exhausting trip. After being collected by a diesel-fueled truck, it travels to its first destination to be sorted. If you’re lucky, your bottle makes the cut — half of all garbage from the recycling bin are simply discarded. Then, it is driven across cities to another facility where the actual recycling begins. It gets washed, sorted again, washed again, grind, then washed again, dried, and finally, heated. You now have tiny plastic flakes.
Making the recycled bottle, unfortunately, is another journey. The plastic flakes are sterilized, tested, melted, extruded into liquid plastic, shaped into smaller pieces, then transported to beverage companies, melted again, injected into molds, stretched, and blown into new bottles to be filled. Now there is a new bottle of water, but you still don’t have it. It then travels, once again, to your local convenience store where you purchase it, drink from it, and throw it away almost immediately.
Now that’s you alone. A million plastic bottles are bought every minute around the world, according to The Guardian. That’s 20,000 bottles every second. Producing one liter of bottled water takes three liters of water and 5.6 to 10.2 megajoules of energy. How many bottles of water do 7 billion people need?
Over 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic has been produced ever since its first boom in 1950, according to a recent global analysis on Science Advances. That is enough to cover the country of Argentina. Only about 2 billion tons of that plastic is still in use, leaving the other 6.4 billion as waste. Of that amount, 79% remain hidden beneath landfills, sitting idly on the streets, or floating in our oceans, and 12% has been incinerated into toxic air. Only 9% is recycled. 9 percent.
We have produced half of all the plastic we’ve made in the past 70 years in just the past 13 years. And if we keep up with this pace, we will have 12 billion metric tons more in the landfill by 2050. That’s more than a ton of plastic garbage for each person on Earth to have, according to an article on The Washington Post.
“Recycling only delays plastic’s inevitable trip to the trash bin,” says author Darryl Fears. While recycling materials like aluminium and paper can be effective in terms of reducing net greenhouse gases as compared to reducing the waste source, recycling plastic is another story.
Firstly, not all types of plastic can be recycled due to their unique chemical compositions and post-purchase contamination. Throughout collection, sorting, shredding, cleaning, melting, and molding, recycling plastic is not only polluting due to the emissions it releases, but also complicated and inefficient.
In Britain, only 45% of recyclable goods make it through the cycle, while the rest take a straight route to the dump. That’s even worse, considering that recycling plastic often requires more energy than producing virgin material, especially with lower oil prices. Because plastics need to be categorized cautiously, the sorting process often require intensive manual labor, as automatized technology occasionally cause errors would can ruin the quality and durability of a whole batch of recyclables.
“Recycled materials have to compete with virgin plastics, and are often more expensive [while] not as good, or pure. So, why would anyone want to use expensive, low-quality second hand?” says Roland Geyer, coauthor of the paper. With low demand and revenue, recycled goods now have even less room in the market.
Recycling has also, on its surface, become a justification for overconsumption disguised as environmentalism. With the guilt of consumption lifted from customers by the recycle sign, manufacturers are able to produce more disposable goods for repeated purchases. Consumers now have a false sense of comfort in tossing their plastic products and packaging down the recycling bin, clueless of the lengthy journey their trash is about the take — as a result, they buy more items and produce more waste.
That doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t recycle. A success story comes from Kamikatsu, Japan, where 80% of all garbage is either recycled, composted, or reused — with thorough washing and sorting of each piece of trash by every household.
Sounds too difficult? There’s something extremely easy that everyone can do to tackle our plastic waste problem: reduce.
This post was created by an amazing GREEN ZINE volunteer contributor, and opinions expressed may not represent the views of Greenpeace. If you are interested in volunteering as a GREEN ZINE contributor, visit this link.
