Published 29th May 2023, i news.
For many of us, doing the recycling is now a normal part of housekeeping. We separate out our paper, glass and tins before putting them in the green bin. Increasingly, plastics have the recycling logo on them. So we rinse them out and save them from the general waste. We know it’s not much, but it’s better than doing nothing.
But recent studies on the environmental and health impacts of plastic recycling challenge that assumption.
Research published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances found that a UK plastics recycling facility was releasing up to 13 per cent of the plastic it recycles as microplastics. A microplastic is any plastic less than 5mm in diameter with the vast majority of microplastics being much smaller – a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair.
The single facility that was the subject of this study discovered that at times it was releasing over 75 billion plastic microparticles in every cubic meter of wastewater. Being so small, microplastics are turning up everywhere: at the bottom of the deepest ocean, in Antarctic snowflakes, deep in our lungs, in our blood. What was particularly worrying about the research on the recycling facility was that it was one of the better managed recycling facilities, having installed costly microparticle filters. Most have not.
Modern plastics contain over 13,000 different chemicals – most of them derived from oil. Many of them are known to be hazardous to human health. A new review from Greenpeace USA finds that recycling can actually increase the toxicity of plastics. That’s because the recycling process can concentrate chemicals such as flame retardants, benzene and other cancer-producing and hormone-disruptive substances.
Plastics can also absorb toxic materials. For example, a plastic container filled with pesticide can over time become contaminated as the pesticide leaches into the plastic. Recycling that container then moves contaminated material into new plastic products, as well as releasing vast amounts of potentially highly toxic microplastic particles into the environment.
What these studies tell us is that recycling is not a solution. But then, it never was, because recycling plastics means trying to modify materials that have been produced to resist change. It’s their longevity and resilience that makes them such an attractive material.
Recycling plastics could play a part in reducing pollution because it diverts waste that could up in the environment such as the ocean, but there is a reason it’s the last R in Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Reusing plastics can keep them out of the waste and recycling system for longer. But reducing plastics must be the priority.
Almost everything we buy includes or is wrapped in plastic. Plastics can serve an important role in protecting some products, but do we need plastic-wrapped corn on the cob? I tried to go plastic free for a week after reviewing the avalanche of research clearly showing that plastic pollution was getting out of control. That meant any internet shopping or online groceries was out of the question. It also meant searching for alternatives to plastic-wrapped products in the supermarket.
In 2019, UK supermarkets produced nearly 900,000 tonnes plastic packaging, almost all of it ending up as waste. In order to reduce my environmental impact, I also try to avoid dairy products, which is good because cheese, milk, and yoghurt would have been off the menu as they all have plastic packaging. Breakfast cereal comes in a cardboard box but has a plastic inner bag. The apples I wanted only came wrapped in plastic. The meat-free burgers were inside a plastic tray. The shopping trip became what felt like an endless and often futile attempt at finding a plastic-free alternative.
This made me realise just how ubiquitous plastics are. We somehow managed to live without them before the 1950s. What happened? In a word: hyperconsumption. The creation of lifestyles built around buying things. Plastics are so cheap that we think nothing of using them once then putting them straight in the bin. But being cheap doesn’t mean there is no cost to such profligate behaviour. Since the 1950s, 8.3 billion tons of plastics have been manufactured. Eighty per cent of that has ended up in landfill, or the environment, or inside of us.
There are promising plant-based plastics that do not contain toxic substances and breakdown quickly into harmless by-products. But we cannot expect them to rapidly scale up production to meet today’s almost insatiable demands. The only effective solution to the plastics problem is the rapid reduction in their use. Simply put, we need to consume far less plastic. This may come from realising that in manufacturing convenience, we have created an environmental and health crisis.