Tackling Plastic Pollution: 'We Can't Recycle Our Way Out of This' - Slashdot

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from France 24: The scale of plastic pollution is growing, relentlessly. The world is producing twice as much plastic waste as two decades ago, reaching 353 million tonnes in 2019, according to OECD figures. The vast majority goes into landfills, gets incinerated or is "mismanaged," meaning left as litter or not correctly disposed of. Just 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled. Ramping up plastic recycling might seem like a logical way to transform waste into a resource. But recent studies suggest that recycling plastic poses its own environmental and health risks, including the high levels of microplastics and harmful toxins produced by the recycling process that can be dangerous for people, animals and the environment. [...]

The share of plastic waste that is recycled globally is expected to rise to 17 percent by 2060, according to figures from the OECD. But recycling more will not address a major issue: after being recycled once or twice, most plastics come to a dead end. "There's a myth with plastic recycling that if the quality is good enough the plastics can be recycled back into plastic bottles," says Natalie Fee, the founder of City to Sea, a UK-based environmental charity. "But as it goes through the system, it becomes lower- and lower-grade plastic. It's down-cycled into things like drain pipes or sometimes fleece clothing. But those items can't be recycled afterwards."

It is therefore difficult to make the case that recycled plastic is a sustainable material, said Graham Forbes, Global Plastics Campaign leader at Greenpeace USA, in a statement this week. "Plastics have no place in a circular economy. It's clear that the only real solution to ending plastic pollution is to massively reduce plastic production." And it is impossible for increased recycling to keep pace with the amount of plastic waste being produced -- which is expected to almost triple by 2060. "There's no way that we can recycle our way out of this," added [Therese Karlsson, science and technical adviser at the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN)]. "Not as it works today. Because today, plastic recycling is not working." "More than two-thirds of UN member states agreed in March last year to develop a legally binding agreement on plastic pollution by 2024, and the second round of meetings to draw up the treaty began on Monday in Paris and will run through Friday," notes the report. "UN Environment Program (UNEP), which is hosting the talks, released a roadmap to reduce plastic waste by 80 percent by 2040."

Karlsson is attending the talks, and she sees reason for hope. "The plastics treaty is an incredible opportunity to protect human health and the environment from plastic pollution. Doing that would mean phasing out toxic chemicals from plastics, ensuring transparency across the plastic life cycle and also decreasing plastic production."