Plastic Recycling News

10.21.2010

Plastic Recycling News

The Recycling Myth*

Collecting plastics at curbside fosters the belief that, like aluminum and glass, these will be converted into new similar objects. From one glass bottle we can make another glass bottle of similar quality, in an economic manner. However this is not the case with plastic.

The best we can hope for
plastics is that these will be turned into other products such as doormats, textiles, plastic lumber, etc.. These products will still end at some point in the landfill – and do NOT stem the need for more virgin petroleum product.

This is NOT recycling, but down-cycling.

But not even this down-cycling is happening.

For instance, in the US 93% of plastics are NOT recovered (put in plastic"recycling" bins). These go straight to landfills. PET bottles that have a
redemption value (cash value) fare a bit better: 62% are NOT recovered. (EPA
data 2008 <http://www.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/materials/plastics.htm>)

How big is the problem? How much waste is generated by single use plastics? Artist Chris Jordan offers the following visualizations.

Imagine 8 football fields http://www.flickr.com/photos/covered
thickly with plastic bottles: this is the equivalent to the number of plastic beverage bottles discarded in the US every five minutes (data: 2009)

Now imagine a line of plastic bottles going around the planet five times. This would be equivalent to the number of plastic bottles discarded every
week in the US..

just for waterhttp://www.storyofstuff.org/bottledwater.php

(data 2009)

Now imagine the waste created by all types of single use plastics put together, by all the countries in the world

(the US is only 5% of the
worlds population)…

This includes plastic bottles, plastic bags, plastic
utensils, cups, containers and more.

It is hard to imagine… We simply need to stop this insane stream of non-recyclable, non-biodegradable, toxic waste.

In most parts of the world people struggle to build basic infrastructures