I've always thought (correctly) that plastics recycling is a lie (even though I am a good liberal and do it anyway)

Turns out the State of California agrees with me!

One of my first jobs was working at a regional grocery chain owned by a well-regarded local family. This grocery chain hired local teenagers, treated them well, and invested in the community in numerous ways.

They also massively lied about their recycling efforts. At the front of the store was a large bin for customers to recycle their plastic shopping bags. This bin even had messaging of the “do the right thing for the environment” sort printed on it. However, every Friday evening when I worked, one of my tasks was to empty this bin full of people’s recycled bags into the dumpster with the rest of the trash. It was such an obvious deception that one of my co-workers even considered going to the local press with this information.

The town residents thought they were doing the right thing, but what was actually happening was their plastic bags were ending up in a landfill. This experience began my long-held skepticism of plastic recycling. In part, because even companies that were generally good actors in their communities were acting this way (so imagine what the bad actors are/were doing).

That is not to say I do not recycle. As a good liberal who cares about the environment, animals, our planet, and the rest, I recycle when possible. Yet, I have always thought I was wasting time (in the case of plastics).

Turns out I was right (usually love it when that happens, but not so much in this case though).

Plastic recycling does not work

In 2022, The Atlantic published a provocative article titled, Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work. The article noted that recycling plastic is incredibly complex. If plastic recycling were to work, all the different types of plastic we use (there are thousands) would have to be sorted separately.

This means we would either have a thousand different bins on the street, each corresponding to a different plastic formula (is this PET#1, HDPE#2, LDPE#4, PP#5?) or someone would have to be paid a salary to separate the many different plastics for recycling (probably eliminating any financial incentive for recycling). Neither of these options will ever happen, so only 5% of plastic waste is recycled. One year, it got up to 9.5%, because the US sent a bunch of plastic to China, where it was promptly not recycled.

This dreary situation is only in plastic recycling. Paper waste is recycled at a healthy 68% (keep breaking down your cardboard!). My aluminum beer cans are recycled at a healthy 76% (I always knew beer was the more sustainable choice than water!).

The good news is that Exxon Mobil, a company that knows that “the world needs ways to reduce carbon emissions”, has come up with a solution. They can just turn plastic waste into….. fossil fuels!

The State of California is now suing Exxon Mobil for exactly this, noting that the company engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception”. The lawsuit argues that the company made it seem that recycling was the solution for plastic waste, knowing it was not feasible.

If Exxon Mobil (also the world’s largest producer of the polymers that make single-use plastics), was the driving force behind the belief that recycling is the solution to single-use plastics, they have been shockingly effective.

Concluding thoughts

I want to start by saying if you read this post holding a plastic water bottle, you should still recycle it. A 5% of not ending up in a landfill is better than a 0% chance. That being said, it is probably better to start using a refillable water bottle and eliminating single-use plastics whenever possible.

Of course, it is always easier said than done. I try to use my refillable bottle, but I still forget it too often (and I also love to drink sparkling water when it is too early in the day for a beer). The deeper point is that we need to use data to guide our thinking about sustainability (and not trust …. Exxon Mobil).

In the single-use plastic situation, it is fairly obvious. Try to limit your use of single-use plastic items. However, sometimes the best course of action for the plant is anything but intuitive.

To give some examples, one of the best things you can do for the planet (and the cows) is stop eating beef. That might not be surprising, however, what shocked me is that free-range cows are far worse for the environment, at least from a carbon footprint perspective, than more mechanical operations (which are worse for the cows). Chickens have the worst life of any livestock but also have a relatively minor environmental impact.

To take another example, building new housing in areas where there is already existing housing is far better for the environment than sprawl. Yet, what often stops this building is environmental regulations. Much housing development in California, a state that is millions of housing units short of what it needs, has been stopped because of CEQA, the state’s signature environmental law. A law designed to help the environment is actively hurting our climate change efforts.

A dense city is far better for than environment than a sprawling suburb, even if there are more visible green spaces in the suburb. I’d recommend not eating meat at all. If you continue to eat meat, know there is a trade-off between animal welfare and climate impact. What is better for the planet is worse for the animals, and vice-versa. These are somewhat counterintuitive examples.

We need to use data to guide our sustainability efforts. The data has long shown that recycling single-use plastics is impossible, but I doubt many people are even aware of this. They went to their local grocery store, thinking they were doing the right thing, until some goofy teenager put those bags right in the trash. Those people were not wrong, they were trying to recycle, and were just not educated properly (the blatant lying by Exxon Mobil certainly was not helpful either).

To end a positive note, emissions per person are going down (in the richer developed countries), despite relatively limited coordinated government action. This is in part because more citizens than ever pay attention and care about the future of our planet.