Plastic Recycling is a Dangerous Myth
Why I don’t count on it for a sustainable lifestyle.
Plastic recycling is the biggest myth ever. When I participated in recycling awareness initiatives during my school days, I believed I was doing something good for the environment. People drinking water in plastic bottles and eating packaged food were a common sight during such initiatives.
I saw many of my own friends drinking water in plastic bottles while raising awareness about recycling!
People thought recycling justified drinking water from plastic bottles and eating plastic-wrapped packaged food. Little did we know that recycling was just another gimmick by big corporations to make sure that the consumption of plastic didn't go down.
The sad part is- even now people believe in recycling. As per a study involving more than 21,000 adults across 30 markets, the majority of people still believe that the most important thing they can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change is recycling as much as possible. It is funny that people sometimes equate recycling with “saving the planet.” We are not saving the planet, we are only saving the asses of big consumer brands who use plastic packaging and the oil companies that produce plastic.
But, is it our fault? There are so many things that affect our judgment. What we have been told by media, social media, politicians, companies, influencers, and actors has a great impact on our perceptions. More often than not, these people lie due to their vested interests.
A politician getting funding from big oil corporations has every reason to promote their lies. An actor getting paid to promote a product won’t mind lying to his followers. In India, we don’t see many actors and cricketers ever promoting a green lifestyle because they make millions of dollars from consumer brands every year.
Plastic Recycling Is A Lie
A report by Greenpeace Organisation found that in the US, the majority of plastic items that municipal recycling programs collect, do not get recycled at all. They end up in landfills. These include yogurt containers, straws, coffee cup lids, go-to containers, egg cartons, lenses, toys, and DVDs, laundry baskets, bread bags among other items.
The situation in developing countries is no good either. India has a garbage mountain spread over a 300-acre. It seems India took its largest “dump” there. If you go to the slums in India, you will find plastic waste all over.
Even the small percentage of plastic that gets legitimately recycled, becomes a lower form of plastic than what it was before. It doesn’t get recycled indefinitely either. Ultimately, it ends up in a landfill or incarcerator. Moreover, collecting, sorting, and transporting plastic waste isn’t a noble process either.
Collecting and sorting this waste is not good for the health of the workers involved in this process. Transporting this waste requires energy that we mostly get from fossil fuels. Recycling also requires energy. It looks as if recycling itself has a carbon footprint!
Earlier, developed countries used to dump their plastic waste in developing countries for it to be “recycled.” China was once the top buyer of the world’s plastic garbage. It later banned solid waste imports claiming it “seriously endangered people’s physical health and the safety of our country’s ecological environment,”.
Other countries are following suit. Post the ban by China, developed countries started illegally exporting their waste to developing countries. But the illegal exports of waste are affecting the health of women and children in these countries.
Next time you buy plastic, think about what you are doing to the health of innocent children and women in developing countries like Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Senegal and Kenya who are finding themselves knee deep in plastic waste.
In 2018, Chinese customs seized a combined 50,000 tons of waste illegally imported to China. Countries, especially the developed ones now have nowhere to dump their shit other than their own backyards. Speaking of the same, read about how your shit contains microplastic too.
Recycling Myth is Created by Big Corporations
When it comes to recycling, the environmental cost benefits are not yet determined. However, this “recycling myth” has been promoted by big corporations as a justification to allow consumption to continue unabated. There are two sets of players who are spreading the myth regarding the so-called environmental benefits of recycling. These are-
- Big oil and chemical companies: They make the petrochemicals used to manufacture plastic. The companies producing plastics are often subsidiaries of these international oil and gas companies, such as Shell, ExxonMobil, Sinopec, and SABIC.
- Global consumer brands: They use huge amounts of plastic in their packaging. These companies include P&G, Unilever, Nestle, PepsiCo, and others.
In order to spread the recycling myth, these players are striking deals with startups that claim they can transform this plastic waste into either fuel or new plastic.
Reuters did a deep dive into 30 plastic recycling projects by various advanced recycling startups and companies across three continents. They interviewed more than 40 people with direct knowledge of the industry. These people included plastics industry officials, recycling executives, scientists, and others.
Most of these projects are agreements between startups and big oil and chemical companies or consumer brands such as ExxonMobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, and Procter & Gamble Co. These startups are either working on a modest scale or have closed down. More than half of them are behind schedule on their commercial plans.
Three advanced recycling companies that went public have seen their stock prices decline after their market debuts. We never had a real recycling system in place and the theory of “circular economy” is a totally useless one. It is just a way for companies to keep selling plastic.
The Myth of Compostable Plastics
Don’t be green-washed by the promise of compostable plastic by consumer brands either! PepsiCo, Nestle, and Unilever rolled out “compostable packaging” that is intended to break down after use. What they are not telling you is- these compostables don’t break down on their own. They require very high heat and moisture.
These conditions are mainly found in industrial facilities. Compostable products are either burned or sent to landfills. They don’t degrade there either as they are deprived of oxygen and micro-organisms in landfills.
Going Zero Waste
The answer to sustainable living is not to find ways to keep up with your consumption of plastic and harmful materials. Recycling is not the way to go.
The point is not to increase recycling, but to decrease consumption and to stop getting green-washed by big corporations with vested interests.
As it turns out, plastic is not as necessary as you believe it to be. It keeps you hooked on products that are harmful, yet convenient.
There is always a better alternative to everything that “comes in plastic” or “is plastic”.
For instance, my hair quality improved so much when I stopped using shampoo. I use ingredients from my kitchen to wash my hair.
By giving up synthetic products and food items wrapped in plastic, you are not doing any sacrifice for the environment because you are a part of the same environment. Anything that is not good for the environment, can’t be good for you. By giving up harmful products that are either plastic themselves or are wrapped in plastic, you are improving your health and well-being, while helping preserve the environment too.
Instead of finding ways to recycle, find ways to go back in time when people went to local vendors to buy real fruits and vegetables without plastics wrapped around them, drank water in solid, reusable bottles, ate food on real plates, and bathed with homemade products without slathering chemicals all over their skin and cleaned their houses without being exposed to harmful chemicals. Go back to the time when neither the products nor the human health and environment were disposable.
Thank you for reading.
In case you want an alternative to plastic, here is an article I wrote earlier this year:
