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Thank goodness for plastics. I’m not a healthcare scientist, but it makes sense to me that utilizing plastics in certain lifesaving medical products and consumables has positively contributed to better human health and longevity outcomes. There must be countless other innovative and critical uses of this strong and lightweight modern-day material that as a whole, make our lives better, but we really need to change our collective expectations and behaviors in order to use substantially fewer plastics, especially single use plastics, which we humans often interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.

In their 2022 Annual report, Exxon announced that is started up one of North America’s largest advanced recycling facilities, capable of processing more than 80 million pounds of plastic waste per year. That sounds pretty impressive to me, but it needs to be put in context that the company also produced an estimated 13.2 billion pounds of polymers (Source: Minderoo Foundation, 2023) used to make plastic in 2021 alone. The Chinese company Sinopec is not far behind as the world’s second largest producer of virgin polymers. 

Minderoo researchers estimate that approximately 2 percent of all plastics produced are recycled, which means the rest are either still being used or most frequently - disposed.

So, why don’t we recycle more?  After all, don’t many plastic products feature the ubiquitous recycle triangle on them? The reality is that numbers 1 (“PET” Polyethylene Terephthalate) and 2 (“HDPE” High-Density Polyethylene) are able to be commonly recycled across the Unites States and the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 30 percent of these plastics end up being recycled (Source: Environmental Protection Agency). Despite the apparent recycling capability, plastic numbers 3 - 7 (Polyvinyl Chloride, Low-Density Polyethylene, Polypropylene, Polystyene, and the extremely broad “Others”) which denote other chemical compositions of the plastic, are rarely or never able to be recycled using current technology.

This is not just a natural resource, pollution, health, or environmental problem, it is also an economic problem. According to the World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company, 95% of plastic packaging material value, or $80–120 billion annually, is lost to the economy. A staggering 32% of plastic packaging escapes collection systems, generating significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean and clogging urban infrastructure. The cost of such after-use externalities for plastic packaging, plus the cost associated with greenhouse gas emissions from its production, is conservatively estimated at $ 40 billion annually — exceeding the plastic packaging industry’s profit pool (Source: World Economic Forum, Ellen MacArthur Foundation and McKinsey & Company - 2016 “The New Plastics Economy” report). 

Plastics definitely play an important role in our society – plastic waste should not. We can do better, both environmentally and economically, and will probably need significant pressure from governments around the world to force and/or incentivize continual innovation to minimize (or eventually eliminate?) the negative pressures the plastics industry puts on the world. We should not expect industry to solve this issue in a timely matter on its own accord.  

Coming soon:

A review of how much plastic litters the land and sea and what that means to us humans at the top of the food chain.