Reduce, Re-use, but stop recycling plastic

In 1976, the US Congressed passed a bill, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which is credited with the start of the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle.” I remember this phrase as one of the consistent and popular catch phrases during my childhood in suburban California. It was accepted by everyone as a statement with scientific legitimacy. Recently I came across an assertion that 97% of recycling ends up in the trash anyways, which sounded absolutely insane. I did some more research on this, and found a National Geographic article from 2018 explaining that a global analysis of plastic waste found that only 9% has been recycled. So 91% is a slightly better result then the 97% statistic that I originally heard, but it made me question why society has accepted such a strong pressure on the individual to recycle their plastic if it is not even recyclable in the first place? After not too much digging, I found that it is because of an abundance of quotes like these:

“By recycling and buying recycled-content products, every Californian can make a vital contribution to preserving our environment… Recycling is not only the right thing to do, it is also the smart thing to do. Every day that recyclable materials are sent to landfills represents a missed opportunity to conserve resources, save energy and create new jobs.”

To be fair to this article, the author is not only advocating for the recycling of plastic but including materials such as aluminum, cardboard, and glass, that can be more successfully processed at recycling plants. However, most people consider plastic to be recyclable, so by using the general phrase ‘recycling,’ it still promotes the misconception that individual disposal of plastic makes a significant difference.

An NPR article on the truth about plastic’s lack of recyclability in 2020 mentioned that scientists and industry officials have known since the early 70s that recycling plastic could “ever be made viable on an economic basis” and would be “unlikely to happen on a broad scale.” So why then, did a few years later, Congress pass a bill that convinced average Americans to recycle their plastic? A former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, told NPR that big oil companies began to advertise recycling plastic to the public because

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment"

I remember at my high school there was a group of students, the Eco Monitors, that were elected by the environmental science teacher and essentially just went around and judged people for putting empty chip bags in the trash instead of recycling them. One day I noticed that as the school recycling and trash cans, that were of course next to each other in the halls, were being emptied, the custodians took an identical looking black, soft plastic bag out of both. With no distinction between the trash and recycling bags, I would bet my life that at least 91% of my high school’s recycling also ends up in the trash. Similar to big oil companies, the administration shirks all noticeable responsibility after engraving our mascot into the recycling cans and appointing students to shame each other for buying a single use plastic water bottle that the school provides in the vending machine.

And so even as landfills reach their capacity, an island made of trash that is twice as large as the state of Texas has formed in the Pacific Ocean, and plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, the popular sentiment that we personally, are responsible for climate change, created by polluting industries to keep their high profits, lingers.

I enthusiastically advocate for reducing and reusing plastic materials, but I think that individuals need to place the pressure back on the large manufacturing companies to invest in other, more sustainable materials for their products instead of selling us plastic and socially engineering popular culture to blame us for their prioritization of profit over the environment. So I say stop recycling plastic and call BS on the personal pressure to recycle not easily recyclable materials in order to sabotage the concept of recycling, which. It will stop these companies from spend millions of dollars hiding their bad practice behind misleading PR campaigns and force them to publicly accept their responsibility for manufacturing harmful products due to a prioritization of profit over global health.