When I was in fourth grade, I attended a school assembly to learn about a phrase we have all come to know: reduce, reuse and recycle. After it was over, I was so excited to tell my parents everything I had learned about recycling and convince them to get a recycling bin. Now that I am grown up, I see the presentation, and all plastic recycling campaigns are propaganda.
Plastic is inescapable. Just think about everything you touched this morning that had plastic in it. Considering plastic has found sanctuary inside our blood and lung tissue, it is not going away any time soon.
Yet, for years, plastic companies have assured us that they are doing their part to use recycled materials and promote recycling campaigns. That was a hoax. A new study reveals that plastic companies mislead the public about the efficiency of plastic recycling as a means to stall legislative and public action.
Most plastics cannot be recycled. Only two types of plastics can be recycled to make high-quality products again: polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, and high-density polyethylene, or HDPE. Those plastics are used to make single-use plastic bottles and jugs. But even though we can recycle those plastics, the plastic’s quality degrades during the recycling process. Plastics are “downcycled,” which is merely a delay for their inevitable future rotting in a landfill or the environment.
The recycling process itself is not economically feasible. Collecting, processing, sorting and transporting recycled plastics requires more labor and resources to produce a lower-quality and less efficient output compared to producing virgin plastic. But still, plastic companies slap on a recycling symbol and, in the tiniest font size, a “please recycle” message on the back of their products.
A study done by Beyond Plastics revealed that in 2021, the U.S. plastic recycling rate was estimated to be between 5% and 6%. The majority of plastic is polluting the air from incineration, wildlife from ingesting plastic waste and the oceans from careless littering and dumping.
That false advertising sounds massively similar to oil and gas companies’ deceptions about the environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels, which is no surprise considering plastic is made from fossil fuels; thus, oil and gas companies have huge stakes in plastic production and profit.
Plastic companies created this system where we would be forced to accept, even praise, disposability. Most of our food – assuming you shop at a commercial grocery store – comes in plastic wrap. Most products shipped from Amazon, really any online retail giant, contain some plastic sealing. We cannot rely on recycling to offset the virgin plastic output from major corporations.
And without any promising U.S. policies to stop plastic production at the source, consumers must choose to consume less plastic. Although a seemingly impossible task, there are some simple changes consumers can make to reduce plastic consumption: shopping at local farmer's markets for produce, investing in a reliable reusable water bottle, buying products with the intent to use them for a long time, and buying less in general.
But those practices do nothing to reduce plastic production. Those practices do not change the fact that every piece of plastic you or I have ever touched is still decaying on earth or polluting our air. Recycling plastic isn’t feasible, it never will be, which means producing mass amounts of plastic each day isn’t feasible either.
Taylor Henninger is a junior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnist do not reflect those of The Post. Do you agree? Tell Taylor by emailing her at th873120@ohio.edu.
