The drive against use of single-use plastic and the movement for plastic recycling in the US have some bad news to bear. The Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics activist groups have released a report which documented a recycling rate of 5-6% for post-consumer plastic waste for 2021. And, while plastics recycling is on the decline, the per capita generation of plastic waste has increased by 263% since 1980.
The disconcerting details: The report, The Real Truth About the US Plastics Recycling Rate, was released Wednesday.
- The failure of plastic recycling is in contrast to paper which is recycled at 66%. High recycling rates of post-consumer paper, cardboard and metals proves that recycling works to reclaim valuable natural material resources.
- Plastic recycling has always failed as it has never reached 10% even when millions of tonnes of plastic waste per year were counted as recycled when exported to China.
- Less than 6% of plastic waste is recycled and the other 94% is disposed of in landfills, burned in incinerators, or ends up polluting our ocean, waterways, and landscapes after being used just once, often for mere minutes.
- The plastic recycling process itself is wasteful, with 30% of collected PET bottle plastic material disposed in the recycling process.
- Historically, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) releases its updated yearly data on recycling rates on 15 November, National Recycling Day. However, the agency has not released updated recycling rates since November 2020 when it published the rates for 2018.
- The Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics examined data from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the latest US exports, and the waste industry to document a US plastics recycling rate of 5-6% for 2021.
- Both groups reject “advanced recycling” or “chemical recycling” because it is "neither viable nor environmentally sound."
What they said:
There is no circular economy of plastics. Plastics and products companies co-opted the success of other material recycling and America’s desire to recycle to create the myth that plastic is recyclable.
—Jan Dell
Founder
The Last Beach Cleanup
