Good Trouble for the Myth of ‘Sustainable Recycled Plastic’
Recycled Plastic is still PLASTIC
As marketers, we love a good story. Someone finds a way to comb the ocean to take out the plastic garbage. And that plastic gets a second life as a pair of shoes. A pair of trunks. A towel. A planter, making it somehow even ‘greener’.
But just because a thing ceases to be one thing (garbage) doesn’t stop it from being another (plastic). It will still end up somewhere at the end of its use, likely incinerated or in a landfill if we’re lucky.
We’re finding that the plastic we ‘rescued’ from polluting our environments isn’t staying where we put it. It’s leaching back out in the form of microplastics. Why? Because we’ve put it into things that are meant to break down. Shoes break down. So do towels and trunks.
We’re well over a decade into ‘made from recycled plastic’ being common but have we told ourselves a great story in order to hide the truth in plain sight? It’s still plastic and that’s bad.
There’s a great future in plastics. — The Graduate
It’s 2010 and in Milan, the annual Furniture Fair, the world’s largest tradeshow of its kind, is in full swing. There are chairs, day beds, and chairs that turn into day beds.
But an innovation is setting the fair a buzz. A chair made from 111 used Coca-Cola bottles.
The partnership between a sustainably-minded manufacturer and the beverage giant set off a flurry of headlines, promising A Second Life for Coke Bottles suggesting we had cracked the answer to the growing plastic problem.
In nearly decade and a half since, we’ve seen recycled plastic show up everywhere. And that’s becoming the issue.
“Plastics are inherently incompatible with a circular economy,” — Greenpeace
The Problems with Recycled Plastic
- It isn’t stopping new plastic from being produced.
In the 14 years since the 111 Navy Chair debuted, global plastic production has increased nearly 50%* and continues to go up each year.
*Measured in million metric tons
2. It isn’t changing brand behavior
Coca-Cola company is still the top source of polluting plastic in the world, actually increasing its use of plastic packaging (in ‘22). All while promising to increase its use of reusable containers.
Its main rival PepsiCo, trying not to be outdone, trails just behind in both polluting plastic and is increasing its use of plastic as well.
Single-use plastic (which everyone by now knows is the worst of the worst) continues to go up (6 million tonnes per year from 2019 to 2021) despite pledges and regulations designed to reduce its use.
3. The process itself may be releasing more plastic
A study of one recycling facility showed 6-to-13 percent of the plastic processed could end up being released into water or the air as microplastics* despite ‘relatively state-of-the-art filtration systems’ in place.
Microplastics = the ubiquitous tiny particles smaller than five millimeters that have been found everywhere from Antarctic snow to inside human bodies.)
4. Recycling plastic may make it more toxic than before
The process can create new toxins (such as dioxin) while the old ones simply carry over into the new product
5. Recycled Sheds
Those recycled plastics are being spun into all sorts of new synthetic materials for use in clothes, shoes, towels, etc. But those fibers still contain plastic, which now can’t be recycled due to its new combined nature and we know now is more likely to leech back into the environment through a process called microplastic shedding.
Learning is only learning when your behavior changes — Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet
Recycled Plastic is JUST PLASTIC
Reclaiming plastic makes for a nice story and plenty of well-intentioned (ex. Patagonia) and maybe not so well-intentioned (ex. Coca-Cola) have been caught up in it. Just like other ideas that seem good on the surface (i.e. carbon offsets) they aren’t quite the panacea they claim to be.
It’s naive to suggest we’re ready to quit plastic cold turkey, but can we stop pretending the word ‘reclaimed’ makes it any more good for us? Much ‘made with less sugar’ on a package of food, that’s all it means.
My wish is that no one EVER sees ‘made with recycled plastic’ and reads ‘SUSTAINABLE’ instead.
Because it is not.
It’s still plastic
That got a second use. But the environment will suffer inevitably as a result of it ever being made.
