Yves here. Although the Greenpeace report discussed below no doubt has more detail, yours truly has long been frustrated by vendors of supposedly healthy products, such as “organic” or “natural” cleaners, who use plastic packaging. My rough and ready understanding was that only clear or white containers could be recycled (and that of course assumes collection and trucking to recycling centers) when I see just about none like that. Why is it so hard to use a clear vessel with a colored label? Or as one company does, an outer cardboard sheath with a paper label and one hopes a clear inner liner?
This recap of the Greenpeace report does not discuss the energy cost of recycling, which is another offset to supposed benefit .
More generally, our former and much appreciated writer Jerri-Lynn Scofield covered the (not successful) war on plastics. She traveled regularly to India, and pointed out that the use of plastic packaging was vastly lower there than in the US. That demonstrated that vastly more could be done to reduce plastic waste by not using as much in the first place. But don’t ask Americans to give up on their vaunted convenience.
By Brett Wilkins, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
A report published Wednesday by Greenpeace exposes the plastics industry as “merchants of myth” still peddling the false promise of recycling as a solution to the global pollution crisis, even as the vast bulk of commonly produced plastics remain unrecyclable.
“After decades of meager investments accompanied by misleading claims and a very well-funded industry public relations campaign aimed at persuading people that recycling can make plastic use sustainable, plastic recycling remains a failed enterprise that is economically and technically unviable and environmentally unjustifiable,” the report begins.
“The latest US government data indicates that just 5% of US plastic waste is recycled annually, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014,” the publication continues. “Meanwhile, the amount of single-use plastics produced every year continues to grow, driving the generation of ever greater amounts of plastic waste and pollution.”
Among the report’s findings:
- Only a fifth of the 8.8 million tons of the most commonly produced types of plastics—found in items like bottles, jugs, food containers, and caps—are actually recyclable;
- Major brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, and Nestlé have been quietly retracting sustainability commitments while continuing to rely on single-use plastic packaging; and
- The US plastic industry is undermining meaningful plastic regulation by making false claims about the recyclability of their products to avoid bans and reduce public backlash.
“Recycling is a toxic lie pushed by the plastics industry that is now being propped up by a pro-plastic narrativeemanating from the White House,” Greenpeace USA oceans campaign director John Hocevar said in a statement. “These corporations and their partners continue to sell the public a comforting lie to hide the hard truth: that we simply have to stop producing so much plastic.”
“Instead of investing in real solutions, they’ve poured billions into public relations campaigns that keep us hooked on single-use plastic while our communities, oceans, and bodies pay the price,” he added.
Greenpeace is among the many climate and environmental groups supporting a global plastics treaty, an accord that remains elusive after six rounds of talks due to opposition from the United States, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that produce the petroleum products from which almost all plastics are made.
Honed from decades of funding and promoting dubious research aimed at casting doubts about the climate crisis caused by its products, the petrochemical industry has sent a small army of lobbyists to influence global treaty negotiations.
In addition to environmental and climate harms, plastics—whose chemicals often leach into the food and water people eat and drink—are linked to a wide range of health risks, including infertility, developmental issues, metabolic disorders, and certain cancers.
Plastics also break down into tiny particles found almost everywhere on Earth—including in human bodies—called microplastics, which cause ailments such as inflammation, immune dysfunction, and possibly cardiovascular disease and gut biome imbalance.
A study published earlier this year in the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that plastics are responsible for more than $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses worldwide annually—impacts that disproportionately affect low-income and at-risk populations.
As Jo Banner, executive director of the Descendants Project—a Louisiana advocacy group dedicated to fighting environmental racism in frontline communities—said in response to the new Greenpeace report, “It’s the same story everywhere: poor, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities turned into sacrifice zones so oil companies and big brands can keep making money.”
“They call it development—but it’s exploitation, plain and simple,” Banner added. “There’s nothing acceptable about poisoning our air, water, and food to sell more throwaway plastic. Our communities are not sacrifice zones, and we are not disposable people.”
Writing for Time this week, Judith Enck, a former regional administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agencyand current president of the environmental justice group Beyond Plastics, said that “throwing your plastic bottles in the recycling bin may make you feel good about yourself, or ease your guilt about your climate impact. But recycling plastic will not address the plastic pollution crisis—and it is time we stop pretending as such.”
We have all been duped into play-acting our roles in the blue-bin fantasy that plastics recycling is real. It’s not.https://t.co/KacqPvAiQJ
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) December 2, 2025
“So what can we do?” Enck continued. “First, companies need to stop producing so much plastic and shift to reusable and refillable systems. If reducing packaging or using reusable packaging is not possible, companies should at least shift to paper, cardboard, glass, or metal.”
“Companies are not going to do this on their own, which is why policymakers—the officials we elected to protect us—need to require them to do so,” she added.
Although lawmakers in the 119th US Congress have introduced a handful of bills aimed at tackling plastic pollution, such proposals are all but sure to fail given Republican control of both the House of Representatives and Senate and the Trump administration’s pro-petroleum policies.
Many plastics are very recyclable, the problem is that ‘plastics’ are not one substance, but a range of products – the primary reason why plastics recycling rarely works well is that disaggregating mixed plastics is very technically difficult. BP invested in chemical cracking plants back in the 1990’s to try to deal with this problem, but for reasons I’ve never been able to find out, this was never followed up. Possibly a casualty of low oil prices at the time, or there may have been technical reasons. The heterogenous nature of plastics also causes issues in incineration, especially when PVC is part of the mix (the chlorine is a precursor element in the production of dioxins).
Another point is that while articles like this focus on the ‘visible’ problem – consumer products – plastics are increasingly used in very large quantities in agriculture and other commercial activities, including construction.
To make the grim news worse, there are indications that in order to try to break the US control of many plastics base chemicals, China is investing heavily to ‘match’ US production, which will lead to an enormous glut in plastics production capacity over the next few years. And many oil producing nations are gearing up to expand production in order to find a use for oil/gas in an EV dominated world. We might well be entering a plastics economic bubble.
Collecting, sorting, and transporting post-consumer waste to a chemical recycling center is a huge cost relative to the price of virgin plastic. This is probably the biggest issue that needs to be solved. There are technologies that are being used at scale (although still small-scale compared to the overall size of the market). In short, it is not a technical issue, it is an economic one.
If private plastic companies are unable to turn a profit by collecting, sorting, transporting and recycling, then have the government do it. They do not need to turn a profit.
And if plastics producers refuse to deal with the external costs of the pollution they produce, then nationalize them and reduce production.
Like you said, it’s not a technical issue – it’s an economic one, and by extension a political one. As the article notes, there needs to be the political will to fix this.
Europe has some taxes on plastic use that are supposed to support plastic recycling, but I don’t believe that it is having any real effect. The usage cost of plastic is still significantly lower than the alternatives.
Germany allegedly recycles over 50% of their plastics. EU average is around 40%.
Oddly though, the global leader in plastic recycling is South Korea. Somehow I doubt that North Korea recycles even more.
Worth mentioning the US did consider banning plastic bottles in the 1970s, when reusable glass bottles were still common. The drinks industry responded by blaming individuals for littering and producing the now infamous “Crying Indian” ad. The goal was to pass their expensive reusable glass bottling costs onto everyone else via cheaper disposable plastics. And once again, we go back to Nixon.
My observation is that this is about finance. The CFO is making the decisions, and from the CFO’s position the most efficient decision is to send everything to the landfill.
The CFO does not want to pay for the handling of empty containers. Empty containers need to be collected, stored, shipped washed, then redistributed. Simply too expensive.
For instance, a plastic milk crate that can be reused 100’s of times (if not 1000’s) and retails for about $5 each is being sent to the landfill because it is too expensive to collect them.
Solution, not sure, but what I know is that until the CFO experiences financial loss when plastic is sent to the landfill, nothing will change.
When my parents bought their first new home in LA in 1968, we were one of the first domiciles on our subdivision, which meant ample opportunities with many new homes being built to collect soda bottles with a 3¢ or 5¢ bounty waiting at the supermarket for yours truly, and I found out just how much beer was drunk on the job site, as beer bottles weren’t returnable-and that was the lions share of what I came across-the bane of my existence they were.
Mexican Coca Cola has been the rage for some time now, as it isn’t made with HFCS and comes only in non returnable glass bottles, and the family would go to Tijuana once a year so my dad could point out the cardboard shacks on the hill driving into Mexico, but I was all about somehow finding firecrackers, and then expanded my horizons by bringing home say 25x 3¢ Mexican Coke bottles that our supermarket would take. (my working life turned out to be all about arbitrage)
The garbage man cometh on Tuesday and picks up the brown, green and blue bins and everything goes to the trash, they don’t even try to hide that it was all a con job now.
Why isn’t every last beverage produced in an aluminum can now?
I did an extensive report 30 years ago on recycling in New Mexico. It became clear to me then that with the exception of paper and cardboard, recycling efforts were total BS.
Serious efforts on plastic reduction have to begin with statewide bottle bills – all 50 states. Follow this up with a large factory-floor tax on plastic beverage and food containers to fund collection efforts. Then require standardization of glass beverage and food containers nationwide including color. This will enable the collection, cleaning and recycling of glass beverage containers while plastic containers are phased out. Glass food containers can be collected, crushed and recycled at a cost. Sound like a plan? Oh, right, we don’t do industrial policy.
Thanks for the bit from Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island’s Virtue Signaler In-chief. Wake me up when Rhody gets a bottle bill.
A bottle bill is a no-brainer you would think. Yet it’s pretty much the same handful of states that have this as it was 50 years ago when I was a kid. Having lived most of my life in states that do have one, I can say that it’s really not much of a hassle at all. For a while (and maybe they still do), Maine even had a deposit on dish and laundry soap plastic bottles, all of which could be redeemed at the grocery store. You get used to the extra up front cost, and then when you redeem the bottles, it’s like getting a discount on your groceries.
The only thing I’d change is the redemption fee, which is $.05 for most bottles, and has been for decades despite the cost of beverages going way up. Maybe make it $.25 to increase the incentive to recycle.
New Mexico recycles about 40% of the glass collected the rest goes to the land fill. This from a seminar I attended a few months ago.
Aluminum is the only container worth buying as it will be reused.
China years ago stopped accepting US plastic because it was terribly sorted making it basically unusable. Not because they don’t know how to recycle it.
Getting rid of plastic? Not going to happen. Forcing companies to make a product that is recyclable is of course much more do able.
The struggle of finding laundry soap powder in a cardboard box…
Plastic is toxic waste that causes cancer.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11925826/
What else needs to be said?
Maybe the 1982 Tylenol tampering case was a plastics insider job. Even your glass jars now feature the damnable ‘safety seal’.
This article dovetails with yesterday’s on decline of male fertility. The plastic soup we live in now is one of the main drivers.