Should you even bother throwing plastic in the recycling bin?

Thank you for carefully rinsing, sorting, and recycling your plastic containers — but plastic is trash and trying to recycle it is futile, Greenpeace said in late October. Greenpeace and other environmental groups have been warning about the petroleum and chemical industry's "greenwashing" of plastic recycling for years, while those chemical companies insist we're just on the cusp of a major breakthrough that will make recycling and reusing plastics feasible and cost-effective. 

Consumers, meanwhile, are stuck in the middle. Is recycling plastic just a feel-good charade we should stop bothering to play act, or is there some utility in keeping up the plastic recycling stream? 

What does Greenpeace's new report say?

U.S. households produced about 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, and only 2.4 million tons of that was recycled, Greenpeace USA said in its report, "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again." That means only about 5 to 6 percent of U.S. plastic waste is recycled, down from a peak of 9.5 percent in 2014 and 8.7 percent in 2018, before China stopped accepting America's plastic refuse for either recycling, burning, or dumping.