Plastics Recycling is a Failure - How to Solve the Problem

AUSTIN, Texas - Aug. 8, 2024 - PRLog -- Given all the breaking news stories in the last few months, perhaps you were not aware that member countries of the United Nations came together in April to negotiate a new Global Plastics Treaty.

Advocates of a global treaty argue that plastic pollution is a worldwide problem and that it will take an international binding agreement to slow (or hopefully reverse) the damage that plastics (especially microplastic pollution) are causing to our oceans and the human food chain that we depend upon.

Proponents of a strong treaty not only wanted to address problems of single-use plastics but also to place overall limits on the production of plastic polymers, including the phase-out of what they described as dangerous PVC, polystyrene, and polyurethane plastics, while severely restricting the high-volume manufacture of polyethylene, polypropylene and PET plastics most associated with environmental plastic pollution. Such an agreement would reduce the use of plastic polymers by 40% between 2025 and 2040.

The seven days of negotiations in Ottawa resulted in two major decisions that disappointed these environmental advocates.

The first was a major decision by UN delegates to limit the scope of the treaty to downstream plastics pollution only rather than consider the full lifecycle of fossil fuel-derived polymer production, downstream plastics production, and distribution.

The second decision was to kick the proverbial negotiations can down the road. Environmental advocates had hoped a binding treaty could be ratified during the Ottawa sessions. Instead, there was an agreement to complete this by the end of 2024, presumably at the fifth Global Plastic Treaty negotiations to be held 25 November – 1 December 2024 in Busan, South Korea.

New Research Indicates that Much Less Plastic gets Recycled than we Thought

Given the depressing amounts of plastic that end up in the oceans, as evidenced by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a slow-spinning gyre of primarily junk plastic circulating in the Pacific that's so large it can be seen from space – it may not surprise you that researchers have recently published a study that much less plastic get recycled than you might think.

This report, from the Center for Climate Integrity, is a blistering takedown of the plastic industry's efforts to promote a virtuous "circular" life cycle of plastic production and recycling, calling the industry's claims of successfully recycling enough plastic a fraud. The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that in 2019, only 5% of plastic in the U.S. was recycled.

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