Recycling is not the solution to the climate crisis » Yale Climate Connection

When I was an undergrad, I lived in the Duke Smart House in Durham, North Carolina, a building designed for climate-conscious students that featured solar panels, rainwater harvesting, and sustainable architecture. As you might imagine, we all love recycling. We recycle everything, even the stuff that definitely shouldn't be recycled, like plastic bags and greasy pizza boxes. We thought we should take this opportunity and do our part to save the environment if the item can be recycled.

Well, we were wrong. We got a call from the facility manager who said we were seriously contaminating the recycling facility on campus. They came to our house and told us about the dangers of over-recycling: they had to shut down the factory several times because plastic bags got stuck in the machines.

The main lesson they teach us is: if you're not sure whether something can be recycled, throw it in the trash. This feels counterintuitive because it appears to contribute to plastic pollution. Plastic thrown into trash bins ends up being buried, burned or entering the ocean.

But the plastic that goes into the recycling bin isn't much better. Although many plastics have the distinctive three chasing arrows symbol, generally only certain types (1 and 2, e.g. bottles, jugs, tubs) are always accepted by recycling facilities. The rest (3 to 7, such as grocery bags, straws, Styrofoam) are mostly rejected and sent to landfills because the cost of recycling the plastic is higher than the value of the recycled goods.

All told, only 5% of plastic waste is ultimately recycled into new products. By making all plastic that has been put into recycling bins recyclable, we may be able to solve the problem of plastic pollution. However, this approach masks a larger issue related to climate change: the carbon pollution associated with plastic production. Plastic production releases more than 150 million tons of climate pollution each year (equivalent to the emissions of more than 300 million cars), so reducing these emissions is vital. However, using recycled plastic to create new products only reduces carbon emissions by 25% compared to traditional production.

This is why recycling rhetoric is so harmful. People think recycling is a good thing, but in reality recycled items are not always reprocessed, and those that are reprocessed do not significantly reduce climate pollution. This might feel like climate fatalism: Even recycling won’t help? Yes, recycling increases environmental awareness, but it has become an end goal rather than a bridge to further climate action.

By successfully shifting environmental responsibility to consumers, plastic manufacturers are still free to pollute, but with limited consequences. Now is the time to push back against the lobbying efforts of the plastics industry, which promotes a recycling narrative to preserve existing business practices.

We must address the root cause of the problem: the lack of cheap and clean alternatives to existing plastics. As mentioned above, plastic has two harmful properties: carbon pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels in its production, and plastic pollution caused by dumping. We need to solve both problems.

Plastic production consumes a lot of energy because many plastic products require high-temperature processing during the manufacturing process. The heat usually comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, which results in carbon dioxide emissions. Recent advances in clean heating could help manufacturers move to electrified heating powered by low-carbon fuels or renewable energy sources.

At the other end of its life cycle, plastic is extremely durable and can take anywhere from 20 to 500 years to break down, often into microplastics that can be harmful to health. Advances in biodegradable or compostable plastics could address plastic pollution by creating alternative chemicals that retain the attractive properties of traditional plastics but degrade faster and to a greater extent.

Currently, neither technology is cost-competitive, but with further innovation they have the potential to reduce costs at scale. We can accelerate the development and deployment of clean heating and biodegradable plastic technologies through intentional intervention across the economy:

• Venture capital firms should focus their investments on clean heating or biodegradable plastic startups.
• Lawmakers should: (a) expand tax credits, such as 48C, for companies that make clean plastics, and (b) create incentives to temporarily cover the “green premium” (higher cost) of clean materials while the technology scales. , and (c) holding plastics manufacturing companies responsible for waste management through regulations such as this as an extended producer responsibility scheme.
• Large buyers of plastics should enter into purchasing agreements with producers of clean or biodegradable plastics to incentivize production and scale-up.
• Rather than poring over packaging to determine whether plastic is recyclable, individuals should (a) reduce or reuse plastic products, (b) use alternatives such as metal or glass, and (c) appeal to legislators to express dissatisfaction with current plastics.

To truly protect the environment, we need to create cost-competitive alternatives to plastic that are clean, biodegradable and have similar performance. Recycling is not the solution.

Shomik Verma is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, whose work focuses on developing revolutionary energy technologies. He is a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Public Voices Fellow at the Op-Ed Project.