Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.
By Douglas Main, Oct 12, 2023, MIT Technology Review & National Geographic
On a Saturday last summer, I kayaked up a Connecticut river from the coast, buoyed by the rising tide, to pick up trash with a group of locals. Blue herons and white egrets hunted in the shallows. Ospreys soared overhead hauling freshly caught fish. The wind combed the water into fields of ripples, refracting the afternoon sun into a million diamonds. From our distance, the wetlands looked wild and pristine.

Further inland, we left the main river channel and paddled into the muddy heart of the marsh—and began to notice all manner of plastic waste. Big things appeared first: empty bags of chips tangled in the reeds, grocery bags just beneath the surface, Styrofoam trays covered in mud, plastic bottles mixed in with other debris.

As we traveled through the marsh, we kept seeing more, and increasingly tiny, bits of plastic. Not just straws, lighters, combs, and fishing line, but unidentifiable and seemingly never-ending small pieces, ranging in size from as big as my hand to as small as grains of sand. You could stay in the hinterlands plucking trash and never leave. Even in one of the less-polluted parts of the East Coast, outside a city with organized waste management and a recycling system, the land and water are awash in plastic waste.

Plastic, and the profusion of waste it creates, can hide in plain sight, a ubiquitous part of our lives we rarely question. But a closer examination of the situation can be shocking.

Indeed, the scale of the problem is hard to internalize. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.

Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.

A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually, concludes a report by McKinsey. (Just over a quarter of all plastics are used for packaging.) One-third of this packaging is not collected, becoming pollution that generates “significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean.” This causes at least $40 billion in damages, the report states, which exceeds the “profit pool” of the packaging industry.

These numbers are understandably hard to make concrete sense of, even at the scale of specific companies, such as Coca-Cola, which produced 3 million tons of plastic packaging in 2017. That’s the equivalent of making 200,000 bottles per minute.

Notably, what doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics, pieces smaller than five millimeters in diameter. In the past few years, scientists have found significant quantities of microplastics in the further reaches of the ocean; in snow and rainfall in seemingly pristine places worldwide; in the air we breathe; and in human blood, colons, lungs, veins, breast milk, placentas, and fetuses.

One paper estimated that the average person consumes five grams of plastic every week—mostly from water. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated. Microplastics are also widely found in beer, salt, shellfish, and other human foods. Significant quantities of these plastic bits have turned up in common fruits and vegetables, as one recent study in Italy found.

All this meant that our journey in the kayaks, picking up plastic waste along the way, looking after our local environment, was—while a genuinely helpful service to our fellow humans—only fixing a symptom of a larger problem.

The solution to that problem lies further upstream: to address plastic pollution, those who produce plastics need to pay for the damage it causes, and the world will also have to make less of it. We’ll have to develop better, more recyclable products. We’ll also have to find sustainable alternatives and increase what ecologists call circularity—keeping those products in use as long as possible and finding ways to reuse their materials after that.

While these are not exactly new ideas, they’ve received renewed attention from global policymakers, innovators, and companies looking to make a sustainable future profitable.

Making less is the most important goal—and the most politically charged one, given the immense profits and political power of plastic producers. “What’s the best way to manage waste?” says Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia. “To not produce it in the first place.”

Because consider this: most of the plastic we make, 72%, ends up in landfills or the environment, according to a 2022 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled, and 19% has been incinerated. Some of it reaches the sea; estimates suggest that between 8 million and 11 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year. According to the National Academy of Sciences, that’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute.

“A scourge on a planetary scale”
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Plastic production has grown dramatically in recent years; in fact, half of all plastics in existence have been produced in just the last two decades. Production is projected to continue growing, at about 5% annually. If current trends continue, humans will have produced 34 billion tons of plastics by 2050—three times the current total.

Plastic pollution—“a scourge on a planetary scale,” as French president Emmanuel Macron has put it—most affects those least able to deal with its consequences. Noting that the plastic industry generates upward of $700 billion a year in revenues, the UN Environment Programme also concluded that the industry “inflicts a heavy burden on human health and environmental degradation, with the poorest in society facing the highest impacts whilst contributing the least to plastic over-consumption and waste.”

This is true at every stage of plastic’s life cycle. Manufacturing plants are concentrated in communities of color—such as in Louisiana, in an area along the Mississippi River often called “Cancer Alley,” which is home to nearly 150 oil refineries, plastics plants, and chemical facilities. Such plants emit air pollution that raises risks of cancer and other diseases. A panel of UN human rights experts said the situation amounts to a “form of environmental racism [that] poses serious and disproportionate threats to the ... human rights of its largely African American residents.”

This pollution also disproportionately harms poor and developing countries that produce little or no plastic, such as those in Africa, the Pacific, and elsewhere.

Solutions such as recycling and reuse cannot deal with this much waste, says Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist and cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute, which studies plastic pollution. “There have to be drastic cuts in production,” he says, especially of single-use plastics.

Dozens of studies and institutional reports—from the likes of the United Nations, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—conclude that continued increases in production of virgin plastics will overwhelm actions to combat the problem.

Alarmed by such data, and animated by growing public awareness of the issue, the United Nations Environment Assembly resolved at a March 2022 meeting to begin working toward a global treaty to end plastic pollution, forming an intergovernmental negotiating committee to accomplish this goal. This group has gathered twice and will meet another three times before the treaty is finalized in late 2024. All parties agree that it will be binding and will put forth a range of mandatory and voluntary approaches. Some have likened its importance to that of the Paris accords on climate change.

Few details have yet been ironed out, but the majority of countries agree that a primary way to prevent plastic from polluting the environment is to make less of it.

Neil Tangri, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of an informal advisory group called the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty, strongly agrees: “We have to dramatically reduce the amount of plastic that we make. Everything else is second order.”

At the second round of talks in Paris this summer, international leaders made this desire clear. Humanity has a duty to begin “[reducing] the production of new plastics,” said Macron, “and to ban as soon as possible the most polluting products.” Representatives from many other countries, from Ghana to Mauritius to Norway, argued the same.

Yet the countries that have not yet embraced limits on production include the biggest producers, such as China and the United States, though they are participating in the process.

Limits or levies on production are not currently being considered as a solution, according to a member of the US State Department (which coordinates the country’s delegation at the UN meetings), who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

“We really need to find a way to bring everybody on board,” this person said, and such “supply side” changes might be unpalatable to certain countries. “We want the strongest and most ambitious obligations that we can get consensus around.”