After Greenpeace Report, What's the Future of Plastic Recycling?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
"Most plastic simply cannot be recycled," said Greenpeace in a recent report. What's next?
For Context: The report estimates that only 4.7% of U.S. household plastics were recycled in 2021, and says "plastic waste is extremely difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort for recycling, environmentally harmful to reprocess, often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and not economical to recycle." As of 2018, the official plastic recycling rate was 8.7%, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Key Quotes: Greenpeace USA's senior plastics campaigner called for a "Global Plastics Treaty that will finally end the age of plastic by significantly decreasing production and increasing refill and reuse." The CEO of the Plastics Industry Association responded, saying that Greenpeace "cannot call themselves environmentalists while simultaneously discouraging recycling as part of the solution to our world’s waste problems."
How the Media Covered It: Left- and center-rated coverage of the Greenpeace report often focused on how to reduce plastic usage and improve recycling effectiveness. Some right-rated news outlets and writers framed the report as evidence that recycling in general is nonsensical. A writer for City Journal argued that "plastic edicts" unjustly enable politicians and environmentalists "to exercise power and pretend to be saviors of the planet."
The Good News: A new firm is transforming broken, tough-to-recycle solar panels from landfill waste to valuable raw materials.
Featured Coverage of this Story
From the Left
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...
From the Center
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...
From the Right
On Second Thought, Just Throw Plastic Away
Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth: recycling plastic makes no sense.
This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians. They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums—probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide—on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.
Now Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality....
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