Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines

Week 321 |Shaping Section | 2

Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 321 | November 3-9, 2023

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

By Douglas Main | MIT Technology Review | November-Decemeber, 2023  Issue

Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen

To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature. 

Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding. 

A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually, concludes a report by McKinsey. (Just over a quarter of all plastics are used for packaging.) One-third of this packaging is not collected, becoming pollution that generates “significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean.” This causes at least $40 billion in damages, the report states, which exceeds the “profit pool” of the packaging industry. 

These numbers are understandably hard to make concrete sense of, even at the scale of specific companies, such as Coca-Cola, which produced 3 million tons of plastic packaging in 2017. That’s the equivalent of making 200,000 bottles per minute.

Notably, what doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics, pieces smaller than five millimeters in diameter. In the past few years, scientists have found significant quantities of microplastics in the further reaches of the ocean; in snow and rainfall in seemingly pristine places worldwide; in the air we breathe; and in human blood, colons, lungs, veins, breast milk, placentas, and fetuses.  

One paper estimated that the average person consumes five grams of plastic every week—mostly from water. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated. Microplastics are also widely found in beer, salt, shellfish, and other human foods. Significant quantities of these plastic bits have turned up in common fruits and vegetables, as one recent study in Italy found.

Most of the plastic we make, 72%, ends up in landfills or the environment, according to a 2022 report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled, and 19% has been incinerated. Some of it reaches the sea; estimates suggest that between 8 million and 11 million tons of plastic waste enter the ocean each year. According to the National Academy of Sciences, that’s the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck of plastic into the ocean every minute.

The solution to that problem: address plastic pollution, those who produce plastics need to pay for the damage it causes, and the world will also have to make less of it. We’ll have to develop better, more recyclable products. We’ll also have to find sustainable alternatives and increase what ecologists call circularity—keeping those products in use as long as possible and finding ways to reuse their materials after that.  

While these are not exactly new ideas, they’ve received renewed attention from global policymakers, innovators, and companies looking to make a sustainable future profitable.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine.  Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.
2. Most of the plastic we make, 72%, ends up in landfills or the environment. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled.
3. The solution to that problem: address plastic pollution, those who produce plastics need to pay for the damage it causes, and the world will also have to make less of it. We’ll have to develop better, more recyclable products. We’ll also have to find sustainable alternatives and increase what ecologists call circularity—keeping those products in use as long as possible and finding ways to reuse their materials after that. 

Full Article

(Copyright of the article lies with the publisher)

Topics: Environment, Plastic, Polution, Recycle