In addition to cutting production, the report argues, the world needs to improve recycling systems, which alone could reduce plastic pollution by 20 percent by 2040. But recycling in its current form is problematic for a number of reasons. First, the recycling rate in the United States is now fair 5 percent of plastic waste. The US and other developed countries have shipped millions and millions of pounds for a long time of the plastic waste they cannot recycle profitably to developing countries, where bottles and bags and wrappers are often burned in open pits or end up in the environment.
A core problem is that plastic products have become much more complicated over the years and therefore much less recyclable: nowadays food bags can have layers of different polymers, or a product can be half plastic, half paper. “By agreeing on design rules and then imposing them with which, for example, a limited number of polymers or a limited number of chemical additives that fit well into the system, which already significantly improves the economics of recycling,” says Llorenç Milà i Canals, head of the Secretariat of the Life Cycle Initiative at UNEP and lead coordinator of the report. “That makes recycling much more profitable, because much less is needed to put those materials back into the economy.”
However, even recycling done properly comes at a huge environmental cost: A study published earlier this month showed that a single facility can emit 3 million pounds of microplastics per year into its wastewater, which ends up in the environment. At least the upside is that the facility would have released 6.5 million pounds of microplastic if filters weren’t installed, so at least there’s a way to reduce that pollution. But these tiny particles have now affected the entire planet, including a wide variety of organisms. And overall, as plastic production increases exponentially, microplastic pollution is on the rise.
In that sense, recycling makes the problem of plastic pollution worse. “Plastic is not designed to be recycled, and recycling it only reintroduces toxic chemicals and microplastics back into the environment and into our bodies,” says Cohen. “The [UNEP] the report’s authors go so far as to acknowledge that even if feasible, a plastics circular economy would be decades in the making, and even in the best-case scenario, following the outlined roadmap would lead to approximately 136 million tons of plastic going to landfills, incinerators and the environment to cause pollution by the year 2040. That is an enormous – and unacceptable – amount of plastic.”
Really, recycling allows the plastics industry to continue making all the plastic it wants, under the guise of sustainability. “If you had an overflowing bathtub, you wouldn’t run to the mop first — you turn off the faucet,” said Jacqueline Savitz, chief policy officer for the conservation nonprofit Oceana, who was not involved in the report. “Recycling is the mop.”
Another strategy highlighted in the new report is “extended producer responsibility,” where manufacturers don’t just make the stuff and wipe their hands off it. The plastics industry has long promoted recycling (although it has known that the current system is not working) because it makes you, the “careless” consumer, responsible for pollution. Extended producer responsibility puts pressure on the industry and forces producers to implement systems to take back and reuse bottles, for example.