The Problem With Plastic Pollution Is Not Plastic
“Have you or a loved one bought items containing plastic? You may be entitled to compensation.” You won’t be seeing billboards with this message on it anytime soon. But there are some people who think plastics manufacturers ought to join the ranks of other companies that have subjected consumers to a harmful and misleading product.
Recent reports claim that petrochemical companies have oversold the recyclability of plastic, including that the research “lays out evidence that could provide the foundation for legal efforts to hold fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies accountable for their lies and deception.”
This overwrought language is based on the fact that plastic products are harder to recycle than some other materials. Some materials, such as aluminum, can be recycled more or less indefinitely. By contrast, plastic tends to be degraded during the recycling process, meaning that a given bit of plastic can only be effectively recycled a few times before it has to be junked.
There are efforts to develop advanced recycling technology that would allow plastic to be recycled indefinitely. This process uses pyrolysis (in layman’s terms, lots of heat, no oxygen) to break down plastic into its base components without degrading it. In addition to allowing for reuse as plastic, pyrolysis can also be used to turn plastic into oil for use as fuel. However, pyrolysis is more expensive and energy-intensive than regular recycling, and for now, such options aren’t being widely utilized.
In the minds of the critics, the emphasis on recycling is part of a propaganda conspiracy by the perennial villain of the environmental movement: the oil industry. Since plastics are ultimately a byproduct of petroleum, oil producers have an incentive to boost plastic sales, and promoting the idea that plastic is recyclable is a convoluted way to help boost their bottom line. Or so the theory goes.
Nevertheless, don’t go spending your class action refund check quite yet. Lawsuits over this issue, should they ever be filed, will face some steep procedural and substantive challenges. In particular, the assumption that consumers only choose to purchase plastic items because they believe they are recyclable is highly questionable. The recycling rate for plastic in the United States is a mere 5%, which is significantly lower than the rates for other commonly recycled materials. If people are buying plastic because of claims that it can be recycled, it makes you wonder why so few actually go through the trouble of recycling them. The simpler explanation is that people buy plastic because it’s cheap and useful.
More importantly, there is a difference between plastic consumption and plastic pollution. Plastic pollution is the harmful accumulation of plastic waste in the environment. The causes of plastic pollution can range from small-scale littering to industrial dumping. Discarded plastic can accumulate in oceans, rivers, or other areas, negatively affecting ecosystems and wildlife.
Plastic pollution is a serious global problem, but it is not primarily a developed world problem. Only around 7% of plastic found in the oceans, for example, originated from a developed country. This is because in developed countries such as the United States, a plastic bottle that isn’t recycled typically ends up not in the ocean but in a landfill, where it has minimal environmental impact.
Changes in plastic consumption alone, therefore, may not have much impact on plastic pollution. To actually reduce the negative environmental effects of plastic pollution, what is needed is not attacks on plastic manufacturers but better waste management, especially in developing countries. Even among developing countries, there is a lot of variation in the amount of plastic pollution by region. Seven of the top ten plastic-emitting rivers, for example, are in the Philippines. For all the criticisms leveled against advanced recycling, it is likely to do more to prevent plastic pollution than will bans on plastic straws in restaurants in liberal cities.
International waste management isn’t exactly a sexy topic. Certainly, it doesn’t attract headlines the way that claims about oil industry fraud do. But if we want to actually deal with the problem of plastic pollution, that’s where the focus needs to be.