Each Monday evening, I roll two large blue barrels full of cardboard boxes, newspapers, blueberry containers, yogurt cups and milk cartons out to the curb.
Between my family and our neighbors, we produce an impressive amount of recycling in a week—sometimes to the point that it piles above the lip of the bin, forcing me to shove the packaging and boxes down to close the bin.
It’ll all be picked up in the morning, I think, forcing the lid down. I remember a five-minute video my 5th-grade class watched that outlined this process. They’re carted off to some recycling plant where they’ll be sorted, packed into cubes and then…reused. Right?
The bins are on the street, and I can return inside. I’m satisfied. I can forget about the recycling until next Monday night when I’ll wheel it back out. For now, I’ve done my part.
Ever since that video in 5th grade, I’ve been taught that by recycling, I am doing my part in saving the environment from plastic waste. I’ve taken sorting my family’s waste as a given and haven’t felt guilty about buying single-use plastics—since they’ll just be recycled when I’m done with them.
This is exactly what the plastics industry wants you to think. Since you’ve plopped your cardboard boxes and yogurt cups in that blue bin, you don’t have to worry about all the future plastic waste these companies will produce.
What I didn’t know was how little of what I put in the recycling bin actually makes it through the process. I thought that putting it in the bin guaranteed its eventual reuse and that it would not “harm” the environment. But data from the EPA shows that in 2018, only 8.7% of all plastic collected from homes ended up being recycled.
In Brookline, we’re budgeting $79,000 for recycling supplies. Despite spending large sums of money on recycling, the vast majority of it will go straight to landfills. Recycling focuses tax dollars on a program that will not significantly reduce the amount of waste we produce.
Throughout the late 20th century, as the recycling movement gained momentum in America, major plastics manufacturers like DuPont and Dow sponsored advertisements and educational videos supporting it.
These ads were part of a decades-old lie told by plastics companies: recycling single-use plastics is a solution to our planet’s problem of plastic waste. In reality, recycling is a largely inefficient, expensive process that doesn’t significantly reduce landfill waste. It’s a way to trick us into thinking we are doing enough to help the planet and that the production and consumption of single-use plastics are acceptable, as long as we recycle them.
“If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,” Larry Thomas, a former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry (now the Plastics Industry Association), told NPR for a 2020 article.
Even though recycled plastics are neither cheaper nor higher quality than new materials, big plastic companies…support recycling. Why? It was a diversion from the real problem. Plastics executives knew they were putting the global environment on a dangerous track. But they made us feel like we were doing something for the environment, that the environmental problem posed by plastic manufacturers had been “solved,” for the most part, that their plastic products could be reused instead of wasted. And it worked.
Plastics degrade each time they are used, and most can only survive one or two reuses. It is not efficient for companies to spend money on recycling processes when they can manufacture new, higher-quality plastic from crude oil.
The classic symbol of recycling—the “chasing arrows” arranged in a circle—is not even trademarked or regulated.
The numbers shown on the bottom of “recyclable” containers code the type of plastic used. Many unrecyclable plastics still display the numbers, leading consumers to recycle what should go in the trash.
Throughout my schooling, I’ve often been taught the mantra, reduce, reuse, recycle. The three-arrow symbol has been ingrained in my head as a halo of environmentalism. But until recently, I have rarely been told anything that disputes the apparently obvious value of recycling. It’s something we all do without question. It might take a little extra thought to rinse out a bottle of orange juice, but in the end, we believe it serves our planet.
“Reduce” comes first in the mantra for a reason. It is a far more effective way of diminishing plastic waste than recycling (which comes last). But for some reason, we don’t put the spotlight on it.
We shouldn’t trust the corporations that make the waste to care about anything other than their profit. Recycling is better than nothing, but it’s like putting an expensive band-aid over a gaping wound. We’re spending huge amounts of money and resources to recycle, but the real issue is the consumption of plastics in the first place. And we don’t talk about that.
