Myth: Recycling Can Fix This

Disposables are everywhere. Paper towels, bottled water, plastic utensils, and paper and plastic bags are quickly collected and just as quickly thrown in the recycling bin. While most believe the damage is undone through recycling, we maintain that it is not the solution to the waste issue.

While there isn’t much data available that captures the overall picture, we can take plastic shopping bags as an example of how effective, or ineffective, recycling is.

There are four reasons why recycling is not the solution:

  1. Recycling rates are low
  2. Poor economics for recycling facilities
  3. The growing glut of plastic bags worldwide
  4. Recycling doesn't address other issues associated with producing disposable items


1. Recycling rates for plastic bags are extremely low. According to a 2007 study conducted by Boustead Associates, only 5.2% of plastic bags are recycled.

2. In addition, economics of recycling plastic bags are not appealing. Recyclers would much rather focus on recycling the vast quantities of more viable materials such as soda and milk bottles that can be recycled far more efficiently. If the economics don't work, recycling efforts don't work.

For example, it costs $4,000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for $32 (Jared Blumenfeld, director of San Francisco's Department of the Environment as reported by Christian Science Monitor in 2007).

Due to the poor economics, the local market for recycled plastic bags is limited. There simply aren’t many manufacturers using the recycled material to make new products. This leaves the U.S. with a surplus of bags collected for recycling.


3. Many plastic bags collected for recycling are wastefully shipped to overseas processing facilities. According to a 2007 American Chemistry Council report, the US exports 57% of its postconsumer recovered film to China (25% of which consists of plastic bags, contained under the blanket term “mixed film”) where there once were “thousands” of plastic processing centers. However, when the economic downturn happened in late 2008, many of these Chinese plastic processors went out of business. Bottom line: there is a glut of this material that is not getting recycled, leaving material recovery facilities with bales of collected recyclable plastic with no one to sell it to.

4. Even if recycling rates of plastic bags increase dramatically, it doesn't solve other significant problems, such as the use of non-renewable resources and costs associated with their original production, or the billions of bags that wind up in our environment each year where they eventually breakdown into tiny bits of plastic that never go away.

What to do? Choose to reuse!


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