Focus on recycling solutions within reach: Talking Points

By Karen Hanna

We all love the big breakthrough.

The Cure. The Moonshot. The Magic Bullet.

Plastics materials number in the hundreds, but we all want the one we haven’t got — the kind that’s sourced from a plentiful, renewable resource, that lasts forever when you want it, that goes away without leaving a mark when you don’t.

That hope explains research into materials derived from biomass — from mushrooms to olive 
pits — that might liberate us from the environmental, political and social costs of fossil-based plastics.

But, as sustainability advocate Robert Lilienfeld points out in the cover story, there are always tradeoffs.

What do we do with new materials, when we can’t even figure out what to do with old materials?

As Lilienfeld says, “There is nothing on the planet that is not recyclable. Everything is just a question of what resources it takes and time it takes in order to make it happen, and whether or not that’s worth doing.”

As a consumer, I’ve seen what people consider worth doing.

Recently, I was at a meeting of folks who share a general love-for-the-Earth vibe. After a meal of pizza, salad and soda, I found trash from that group commingled with recyclables.

I dug out bottles and cans with my bare hands, drawing disgusted looks from people I know have tut-tutted others for littering or driving big SUVs.

If they can’t separate their PET from their paper plates, is it reasonable to expect anyone to figure out the difference between industrial compostable and garden-variety biodegradable? 

So far, the industry has taken a responsible approach to new materials, trying not to contaminate streams of materials we already recycle.

As the Plastics Industry Association proclaims, “Recycling is real.” 

That part’s true, but there’s a more important point that’s missing: People need help figuring out how to do it.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the overall plastics recycling rate is around 9 percent.  

The EPA's most-recent numbers are from 2018, but even if recycling has improved since then, we have a long way to go.

The rate of recycling of PET — generally considered the easiest target in circularity efforts — has hovered around 30 percent for a decade, even as demand for recycled content has exploded, the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR) says in its most recent “PET Recycling Report”.

NAPCOR states: “To reach a widely quoted target for rPET content — 25% by 2025 — in all US bottles, PET recyclers would need 1.75 billion pounds of collected PET or 85% more collection than in 2022. To achieve 50% recycled content by 2030 in US bottles, 3.87 billion pounds of postconsumer PET feedstock would be required, which is more than three times the weight collected in 2022."

We have to get better fast.

However, people can be lulled into a sense that most materials already are finding a second life. 

Many communities, including mine, offer single-stream recycling, and a peek inside those bins reveals what people might consider recyclable — containers of one plastic, lids of another, an occasional pizza box, all of it smeared with food waste and grease.

When the septic pipe in my basement failed last year, where did the crew throw away the wreckage?

You guessed it — the recycling bin, which was parked 3 feet closer to my door than the garbage bin.    

As new materials hit the market, it’s hard to imagine people will be more careful with their end-of-life needs than they have been with the end-of-life needs of the materials to which we’re already accustomed.       

Amid the search for a better material and a more robust infrastructure, maybe what we need most is more education, with a focus on the kinds of materials that we could most easily recycle better.

Because what we’re doing now — compared with where we need to go from here — doesn’t 
seem sustainable.

Like the search for new materials, the recycling industry is in a bit of a bind.

There is demand for recyclable materials, but there’s not enough of them. And the cost of separating them from all the garbage hampers interest in the investment it might take to build an infrastructure that could better separate and save them. 

Somewhere between recycling just 9 percent of materials and going for a true moonshot — the 100 percent that Lilienfeld asserts is theoretically possible — we could achieve more just by concentrating on what’s in front of us.

The 70 percent of PET that isn’t recycled should be a start.

For Lilienfeld, that means promoting less-glamorous strategies, like bottle-deposit laws that have been shown to influence people’s waste-disposal habits. 

Maybe prompting better recycling behavior also will require more sticks, as well as carrots.

A cleaner, more homogenous stream is a more profitable stream — one that might eventually subsidize investments that make expansion of recycling possible.

For that, we don’t need more materials; we need to do a better job protecting the value of the ones we already trash.