In the West, the bulk of this “recyclable” waste (more than 80 percent) is mismanaged, often dumped in open landfills.
Only (some) paper products and aluminum cans are likely to be recycled. Many types of plastic can NOT be recycled cheaper than creating new products in Western countries.
The 1960s ushered in the dawn of single-use plastics, when shopping bags, straws, tubs, utensils, and food wrap became exceedingly cheap to produce and convenient to use, as long as no one paid attention to where it was going. When the first curbside recycling programs appeared in the 1970s, just as U.S. landfills started running short on space, the point of recycling was no longer to mine an untapped resource, or to get the most out of old stuff, but simply to find a place to put it.
The flow of plastic from rich countries to poorer ones, glutting waterways and leaching chemicals into the environment, recalls colonial-era destructiveness.
Some three decades later, the accumulation of plastic wastes led the U.S. to look abroad for dumping destinations. By the 1990s, half the plastic Americans chucked into the recycling bin “was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” instead of making it to the local recycling center. “Why invest in expensive technology and labor to keep up with the constantly changing world of packaging and plastics when the mess could be bundled off to China in exchange for easy money and the appearance of being green?”
There is a chasm between “theoretical recycling” and “actual recycling.” (The chasing arrows symbol is a lie: Most plastic types captured by the arrows are considered “financially unviable” to recycle.) In 2018, China banned most imports of plastic, meaning that recyclables collected in the United States could no longer be shipped out of sight, out of mind. Instead of bringing in easy revenue by sending waste to China, U.S. cities, towns, and waste companies now faced staggering costs, and as a result, recycling fell off a cliff. The pandemic’s disruptions of global supply chains only exacerbated the problem of sending junk to other countries. Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other nations now absorb a portion of our waste, “a global hot potato,” as reporters referred to it in The Guardian. The bulk of this waste (more than 80 percent) is mismanaged, often dumped in open landfills, according to researchers. The flow of plastic from rich countries to poorer ones, glutting waterways and leaching harmful chemicals into the environment, recalls colonial-era destructiveness.
