Why most plastic isn’t getting recycled

Jan Dell, the outspoken recycling critic and thorn in the side of the plastics industry, wants the American public to face facts.  

Those grocery-bag drop-off boxes, she says, are glorified trash bins. That swirly recycling symbol on coffee lids and granola pouches is more fantasy than fact. Clear plastic bottles are recyclable: green ones are not.  

“You walk in a Walmart and see all these single-use Halloween decorations,” Dell said. “All that will be in a landfill the week after Halloween.” 

Dell, a chemical engineer who vice-chaired a federal climate committee in the Obama administration, is behind a new Greenpeace report that puts the national recycling rate for plastic at a heart-sinking 5 percent.  

Not all the plastics news is bad. Recycling trucks do not routinely cart plastic bottles and jugs off to landfills and incinerators; that is urban legend. And the technology exists to recycle an array of plastic flotsam that almost no one recycles now.  

But that recycling isn’t happening, and Dell prefers to focus on the now.