17/06/2024 | Quillette | By Frank Celia
The recycling industry—and the world at large—has yet to fully reckon with a bombshell study that dropped last year.
By now, you probably know that plastic recycling is a scam. If not, this white paper lays out the case in devastating detail. To summarise, amid calls to reduce plastic garbage in the 1970s and ’80s, the petrochemical industry put forth recycling as a red herring to create the appearance of a solution while it continued to make as much plastic as it pleased. Multiple paper trails indicate that industry leaders knew from the start that recycling could never work at scale. And indeed, it hasn’t. Only about nine percent of plastic worldwide gets recycled, and the US manages only about six percent.
As bad as this is, the situation might actually be much worse. According to an emerging field of study, the facilities that recycle plastic have been spewing massive amounts of toxins called microplastics into local waterways, soil, and air for decades. In other words, the very industry created to solve the plastic-waste problem has only succeeded in making it worse, possibly exponentially so. While the study that kicked off this new field received some press coverage when it appeared last year, the far-ranging import of its findings has yet to be fully integrated into environmental science. If the research is even close to accurate, and to date it has not been substantively challenged, the implications for waste management policies across the globe will be game-changing.
For a start, no one has fully documented the massive amounts of microplastics (MPs) at issue here. As I’ll demonstrate below, not only do plastic recyclers appear to be a major source of MP contamination, they may very well be the number one source of primary microplastic pollution on the entire planet. So, from an environmental perspective, recycling plastic could be doing far more harm than good. Even some environmentalists are coming around to this view.
From a legal perspective, MP pollution poses an existential threat to the plastic recycling industry itself. Changing case-law precedents make it easier than ever for individual entities like recyclers to be held liable for environmental malfeasance. And this threat couldn’t come at a worse time for the sector. It’s already reeling from market forces wreaking havoc on its business model, in addition to a series of PR disasters (like the white paper above) turning public opinion against it.
Finally, if plastic recycling really is a net negative, what then? Humanity still faces a dire plastics waste problem. We’re making 400 million metric tons of this non-biodegradable material a year, nearly half of which is in the form of single-use items that go directly into the trash, and we’re on track to hit 1,100 million metric tons by 2050. Policymakers need to do something, but what?
The reflexive answer from environmentalists is “Make less plastic!” That sounds reasonable, but on closer inspection, it lacks widespread feasibility. Vital industries like healthcare and agriculture would grind to a halt without the benefit of single-use plastics, not to mention the ubiquity of reusable plastics in just about every aspect of modern life. Realistically, with the dream of recycling our way out of this problem rapidly fading, the less-than-perfect yet practical solution of waste-to-energy—that is, burning plastic garbage as fuel—needs to be reevaluated.
Best Laid Plans
Facilities that recycle plastic—known in the business as reclaimers—sort items by type and colour and then feed them into shredding and grinding machines, reducing them to small shards. Before being melted down to create recycled plastic, the shards are vigorously washed to remove dirt, labels, adhesives, and other foreign bodies. Reclaimers then filter this wash water and discharge it, into either open water sources or municipal water-treatment systems.
The process involves heavy machinery like knife mills that subject plastic items to enormous mechanical force, generating a lot of dust. It’s logical to hypothesise that this dust contains high levels of microplastics, usually defined as particles between five millimetres and one micron in diameter. (Particles smaller than one micron are considered nanoplastics.)
Enter Erina Brown, a young grad student at the University of Birmingham who wanted to use her recently earned Master of Sciences degree in Sustainability and Environmental Studies to investigate real-world problems. After the study she conceived and helmed briefly made her micro-famous last year, Brown described her philosophy as a scientist to a podcaster: “I think one of my bugbears is when academia stays solely within academia and doesn’t really leak into industry or public knowledge or anything.” So, she decided to investigate “the potential for a plastic recycling facility to release microplastic pollution and possible filtration remediation effectiveness.”
In interviews, Brown has repeatedly noted that she and her team were fortunate to have been granted admittance to the study site at all, because recyclers have a reputation for secrecy and distrust of outsiders (more about that in a moment). In exchange for access, the research team granted the UK reclaimer where the study took place anonymity, which to date it has maintained. By chance, the UK reclaimer—a relatively new, state-of-the-art facility—was upgrading its water filtration system at the time. So Brown’s team took MP samples from wash water discharge points both before and after the new installation.
Even with the new filtration system, the study found that the plant’s discharge water contained upwards of 75 billion particles of MPs per cubic metre, far exceeding the team’s expectations. To put these results into perspective, pre-filter, about 13 percent of all the plastic garbage entering the facility was leaving it via MPs in the wash water; post-filter, that figure was about six percent. Extrapolated yearly, that comes to 2,933 metric tons of MPs discharged pre-filter and 1,366 metric tons discharged post-filter.
More troubling was the size of the microplastics. The team measured for particles as small as 1.6 microns. In some samples, they found 95 percent of particles were under ten microns (the size of a human blood cell) and 85 percent were under five microns. Ingesting particles smaller than ten microns is known to be hazardous to marine life, and scientists believe it may pose risks to humans as well. Further, Brown believes that numerous particles smaller than 1.6 microns—many of which are nanoplastics—probably eluded measurement altogether. “We logically know—obviously we didn’t prove it in this study—but we logically know that there would be a lot of particles under 1.6 microns as well that didn’t show,” she told an interviewer.
Finally, the team found high levels of microplastics in the air inside the plant, and 61 percent of these particles were smaller than ten microns. Particles of this size can enter human lungs and cause disease, a problem that came to light about 20 years ago among workers in nylon flocking plants and became known as “flock worker’s lung.” Since neither the suspected nanoplastics nor the atmospheric MPs were included in the study’s total discharge volume, the authors believe the results probably represent an underestimate. “I was incredibly shocked,” Brown told the Guardian. “It’s scary because recycling has been designed in order to reduce the problem and protect the environment. This is a huge problem we’re creating.”
Given the plant’s state-of-the-art credentials, Brown doubts that other reclaimers around the world are doing a better job at preventing MPs pollution. Nor could she foresee any technological fix. To filter and capture such small particles, reclaimers would need to install full-fledged wastewater-treatment machinery—an economically unfeasible option that, in any case, would still fail to address the atmospheric microplastics.
Crunching Numbers
While decrying the absurdity of plastic recyclers producing the very pollution they were designed to forestall, none of the study’s press coverage went so far as to call for a moratorium on reclaimer activity. Most took a stance similar to that of the Washington Post, which under the subhead “Keep recycling” wrote: “Despite the study’s findings, experts emphasized that the answer isn’t to stop recycling.” The story then quotes Judith Enck, a former senior EPA official who now heads the advocacy group Beyond Plastics: “This is not a major reason why we have such a significant problem with microplastics in the environment. … But it’s potentially part of it and there’s an irony to it because it involves recycling.”
Wait, irony, sure, but not a major reason? According to what data? Enck does not say. To check her claim, I decided to explore the matter a little further. In a news story on the conservation website Mongabay, one of the study’s co-authors, Deonie Allen, makes an informed guess about the amount of MPs the world’s reclaimers might be disgorging: “This means that global plastic recycling could be producing about 2 million metric tons of microplastic waste each year.”
Okay, that seemed like a good place to start. According to this business directory, there are 3,065 reclaiming plants in operation around the globe. Two million divided by 3,065 comes to 653 metric tons from each plant per year, or about half what the anonymous UK plant was thought to be producing after the new water filter installation. Keep in mind that most plants probably don’t benefit from such recent technology. Also keep in mind that this figure excludes particles smaller than 1.6 microns.
On the other hand, we don’t know the size of the anonymous UK facility. It may be a particularly large one, with correspondingly higher MP output. Also, the samples from Brown’s study may have been outliers, or their methodology may have been skewed, or other mistakes may have been made. In truth, the estimate that 6–13 percent of the total amount of plastic entering the facility exits in the form of MPs in the wash water does seem a little high, even given the harsh mechanical friction the plastic garbage undergoes.
With all these variables in mind, 653 metric tons of MPs coming from each plant for a total of two million metric tons per year globally seems like a fair ballpark estimate. Let’s work with that. Now, how does two million metric tons compare with other sources of microplastics? Environmental science divides MP pollution into two broad categories: primary and secondary. Primary microplastic pollution occurs as a byproduct of the wide variety of polymers we use in everyday life: laundering and wearing synthetic fabrics; microbeads in cosmetic products; vehicle tyre abrasion; city dust from the soles of shoes; fishing gear used in the ocean; road markings; paint coatings; marine vessel coatings; athletic field turfs; pellet losses during transportation; and sludge from sewage treatment plants used as fertiliser.
Secondary microplastic pollution happens at a slower pace, from MPs leaching into soil and groundwater from plastic items in landfills, illegal dumping of plastic garbage in oceans, and random litter blowing around on land or floating in the sea. The amount of secondary MP pollution is difficult to estimate because no one is sure how much illegal dumping goes on.
One study put the total amount of primary-microplastic pollution at three million metric tons a year. Another study estimated 3.2 million metric tons a year. In other words, if my math is correct, plastic recycling alone may very well generate two-thirds of the total amount of primary microplastic pollution on the entire planet from all those sources mentioned above combined. That sure sounds like a “major reason” why we have such a significant problem with microplastics in the environment to me.
Dirty Work
One astonishing aspect of this story is the muted response it elicited from the recycling industry. When an Australian broadcaster asked Brown how the UK plant reacted to her groundbreaking study, she had this to say: “So we didn’t actually get a response from the plastic recycling facility once we’d published the research. I think we were really lucky in the first place to gain access to take samples because a lot of the waste industry—and within that the plastic recycling industry—is so closed-doored and quite secretive, both outwards towards the public and within the industry.” Apart from a few quotes from petrochemical types in the news coverage, the industry hardly reacted at all. And what little it did say was flimsy.
In a short issue brief, the Association of Plastic Recyclers countered that Brown’s study failed to mention that reclaimers in North America “typically” route their wash water into municipal water-treatment plants that solve the problem by capturing the microplastic runoff. While it’s true that many recyclers channel their wash water to treatment plants, even the best of these facilities only capture about 90 percent of MP particles, while less efficient plants in developing countries perform far worse. In any event, this solution makes no sense, because even if water treatment plants captured 100 percent of all MP particles, they almost always ship their microplastic-infused sludge byproducts to farms where they are used as fertiliser. So, the MPs would enter the environment through soil. Agriculture contamination of this sort has already resulted in a lawsuit in Britain.
The brief then adds that “nearly all North American” reclaimers (plants on other continents go conspicuously unmentioned) use a process called Dissolved Air Flotation (DAF) to remove MPs from wash water. Yet the brief offers zero evidence to support this claim. In fact, a literature search reveals that DAF has seldom, if ever, been proven to filter MPs. According to a 2024 paper: “Studies evaluating the efficacy of DAF in removing MPs under various circumstances, such as MP density, size, shape, and composition, have not been conducted. As a result, it is now difficult to provide correct and thorough observations for this technology’s elimination of MPs.”
The sad truth is that, unlike paper, glass, and metal recycling, the science underpinning plastic recycling has always been, at best, questionable. From the beginning, the industry’s own chemists repeatedly told them it wouldn’t work. Most types of plastic can’t be recycled at all, and the ones that can become more toxic during the process. “The reality is that plastics can only be recycled—or more accurately ‘downcycled’—once, rarely twice,” the white paper concludes. It then becomes trash just like virgin plastic. Recycling merely delays its journey to a landfill or worse.
In recent years, the industry has tried to change the narrative by touting so-called “advanced” recycling, sometimes called “chemical” recycling, but so far none of this tech has panned out either. Even some of the industry’s own trade journalists say it will never work under any circumstances. For decades, recyclers got away with these failures because, up until 2018, they were selling almost all their trash to China and calling it “recycled,” even though, in reality, tons of it were being incinerated, landfilled, or dumped in waterways. The reclaimers were basically skimming the most profitable plastic items off the top and then exporting the rest. In addition to exposing plastic recycling’s inherent flaws and pretty much destroying its business model, the China ban also pushed the industry into some dubious behaviour.
To understand this behaviour, a little background is necessary. Recycling enjoys a “green” eco-friendly brand identity that can distract from the fact that it’s an offshoot of the waste-management business, a sector with longstanding and notorious ties to organised crime. While the vast majority of recyclers are honest, law-abiding citizens, sketchy things do still happen with some regularity. In 2017, New Jersey, home to some of the world’s first reclaiming facilities, issued a report exposing mob corruption in recycling, a practice partly made possible by a lax regulatory framework designed to attract private investors when the industry was young. Other US states experiencing similar corruption include California and Arizona, West Virgina, Minnesota, and Louisiana. As recently as last year, underworld elements infiltrated Germany’s Aurubis, one of the world’s largest recyclers, and stole millions in precious scrap metal, a swindle that may have involved the company’s CEO and at least two board members.
When China closed its doors in 2018, developed countries in the West resorted to diverting millions of tons of garbage to Southeast Asian countries—often whether they wanted it or not, a practice that unleashed environmental havoc on the region. A web of organised-crime groups, shady middlemen, and legitimate recycling companies used falsely labelled containers, circuitous shipping routes to obscure ports of origin, and garbage disguised as other products to fool these nations into accepting our trash. One of the biggest culprits is California, paradoxically because of its strict green laws. A 2011 state law requires California cities and counties to “recycle” 75 percent of their waste but does not specify how to accomplish this goal. Many officials there feel they have no choice but to export their way to compliance.
Blood in the Water
Thanks to decades of primary and secondary microplastic exposure, every human being alive now teems with the stuff. They’ve been found in every human organ, including the brain, the placenta, testes, breast milk, and sperm. Science is still trying to figure out the health repercussions, but MPs are thought to induce endocrine disruptions that lead to reproductive problems, cancers, and inflammatory and immunity diseases. Nanoplastics and MPs have been blamed for playing a role in plummeting fertility rates and in spiking cases of cancer among younger patients in their 30s and 40s, the latter of which some physicians are now calling an epidemic.
Given this growing body of science, Brown’s landmark pilot study, the studies that followed it, and additional studies surely in the works could all blast open a pathway to devastating legal consequences for plastic recyclers. The sharks smell blood in the water. Trial attorneys are already salivating and sharpening their knives. Risk managers, the experts who advise insurance companies, are worrying openly in print. And insurers, currently fleeing the sector in droves, may grow even more reluctant to write policies for these facilities.
Unfortunately for plastic recyclers, legal precedents set by ongoing PFAS “forever chemical” litigation offer a paradigm that will be easy for plaintiffs’ attorneys to follow. Litigation targeting large chemical companies that manufacture PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl) chemicals is a juggernaut currently steamrolling through courtrooms all over the US and the world. These substances—called “forever chemicals” because they don’t naturally break down in the body—include some 15,000 compounds used to make products more resistant to water stains and heat. They’ve been linked to cancer, liver conditions, birth defects, and many other health problems. Legal scholars predict payouts in these lawsuits could well exceed the $200 billion paid by Big Tobacco in the 1990s.
A great deal of overlap exists between microplastic pollution and PFAS pollution. According to a risk-management company, some MPs are made of PFAS, such as polytetrafluorethylene (PTFE) and polyvinyl fluoride (PVF). Some plastic products, such as synthetic textiles, can be coated in PFAS. Some PFAS may be added to microplastics during manufacturing, such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC). And one type of PFAS, known as polymeric PFAS, can break down into MPs in the environment.
A key innovation of PFAS litigation involved using site-specific pollution identifiers to hold large manufacturers liable for their chemical products. Many PFAS lawsuits began as investigations into military bases where periodic fire drills spread flame retardants containing forever chemicals into the environment. Some see a similar roadmap for litigation against plastics manufacturers. “The plaintiffs in these cases are using innovative legal arguments, particularly related to public nuisance theories of harm, to successfully bring these cases forward,” according to a white paper. “We think these new legal strategies will also open the door for plastic litigation.”
An Industry Week article adds:
Given the ubiquitous nature of microplastics in the environment, regulatory agencies and plaintiffs alike may cast a wide net when identifying potentially responsible parties. But even before we have robust microplastic regulations, plaintiffs are already using existing laws to find ways to target plastics in the environment, from citizen lawsuits to challenging claims regarding sustainability and recycling as they relate to plastics. [emphasis mine]
It won’t take long for ambitious plaintiffs’ attorneys to realise that they can use reclaiming plants as a pathway to enormous financial settlements from deep-pocketed plastic manufacturers in the same way that their colleagues used military bases to target PFAS manufacturers. Unfortunately, unlike petrochemical companies, recyclers can’t afford to write multibillion-dollar cheques.
In fact, the plastic recycling industry is in such bad financial shape that it’s been reduced to begging governments to guarantee its markets. To cite just one example, at a European industry conference last year where many grievances were aired, Caroline van der Perre, managing director of the Belgium-based recycling firm RAFF Plastics, called for regulators to extend “the obligations to use recycled materials.” Further, so-called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws and regulations, popular rallying points for industry lobbyists, usually contain language that guarantees and safeguards markets for recycled plastic.
“Just Incinerate It All”
So, if we can’t recycle our way out of the plastics garbage deluge, what’s the alternative? Most environmentalists say the obvious answer is to tackle the problem at its source by manufacturing less plastic, particularly the single-use kind. “[S]olutions include enacting bans on single-use plastic bags and unrecyclable single-use plastic food-service products,” runs a typical bromide.
Leaving aside the question of whether or not large-scale single-use bans are even politically feasible given the enormous influence of the oil and petrochemical industries, such solutions contain two fatal flaws. First, single-use accounts for only 50 percent—at most—of all plastic manufactured, so even if somehow all of it were banned, we’d still have a significant problem. And second, the medical world alone would grind to a disastrous halt without single-use plastics. Realistically, unless civilisation plans to return to life in grass huts, plastics will remain an essential pillar of modern life for the foreseeable future.
With what appears to be the imminent departure of plastic recycling, waste-to energy solutions will move up a notch on the list of viable policy options. Burning garbage for fuel has been happening around the globe at scale for many years, especially in places where room for landfilling is scare, like Europe and Japan. The waste-to-energy (WtE) option achieves three positives:
- It solves our rapidly growing plastics disposal problem.
- It displaces the need to extract other petroleum fuel products.
- It is far more renewable than coal, oil, or gas (because much of it is biomass).
Further, the need is practically limitless. According to this Reuters investigation, the cement industry alone could incinerate every scrap of plastic garbage produced in a year.
Because burning trash creates CO2 greenhouse gas, environmentalists generally hate WtE. But this is a complex issue, since landfilling garbage leads to huge emissions of methane, which has 28–36 times more impact on global warming than CO2. In other words, there’s a case to be made that burning trash for energy produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than landfilling. Such a case hinges on how clean WtE incinerators burn, and this remains a point of contention. Depending on which side you believe, WtE incinerators produce CO2 somewhere between the rate of coal, the dirtiest burning fossil fuel, and diesel, the cleanest burning one. In any case, with regard to greenhouse-gas emissions, there’s widespread agreement that WtE options fall somewhere within the spectrum of fossil fuels.
In essence, this argument boils down to weighing the risk of greenhouse gases against the risk of microplastics in our bloodstreams. To me, the threat of MPs seems far more immediate, especially given the likelihood that avoiding WtE options will do little to curtail CO2 emissions. Most growth in new greenhouse-gas emissions occurs in developing countries that are burning coal for power, and developing countries are not about to stop developing any time soon. Those incinerators are going to burn something. Why not solve at least one problem by switching them from coal to trash?
Proponents of WtE and environmentalists bicker endlessly over whether burning biomass garbage is “carbon neutral.” The answer to that question lies beyond the scope of this essay, other than to say it’s starting to feel like a debate over where to place the deck chairs on the Titanic. We may be past the stage where we can allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good regarding this pressing global issue.
At least one forward-thinking environmentalist thinks likewise. In September of last year, Erina Brown appeared on the podcast Rubbish Talk. One of the show’s two hosts, Alasdair Meldrum, who possesses impeccable green credentials, said the following about microplastics and recycling:
I used to deliver the Institute of Waste Management’s “Waste Smart” course, and it was all about waste hierarchy and sustainability. And one of the things I used to do, just to make a point, was I always used to say to people “We should stop recycling plastic. We should just incinerate it all. We should just capture the energy because it’s effectively oil—recover the energy. We’re wasting our time recycling.” You know because one of the challenges you’ve got in the UK is everybody assumes we can recycle plastics really well. In actual fact, it’s probably one of the hardest materials [to recycle] we’ve got. It’s light, it’s hard to collect, it’s expensive to collect, and really expensive to process. It’s got a lot going against it in terms of the actual recycling. And, you know, if you add into that about what we were saying about the microplastics, in the end we’re potentially creating a big issue there. Then maybe we do need to look at that a bit more closely and say: is it worth doing all that effort in terms of recycling plastic? The waste-to-energy guys love me at the moment for saying that! [all laugh]
Yes, laughter seems to be the only bearable response here; the alternative is terminal despair. Brown’s study contains a strong element of Greek tragedy. Like Oedipus, in trying to avoid our fate, we have only made it inevitable. Instead of evading plastic pollution, we have helped to inject plastic toxins into every living thing on the planet.
How we extract ourselves from this tragedy needs to be debated. But the fate of plastic recycling shouldn’t be. It deserves to be sent straight to the same graveyard as Prohibition and integrated busing, two other grandiose 20th-century ideas that didn’t just fail miserably but also made the problems they sought to fix demonstrably worse.
Frank Celia is a freelance journalist who has covered the healthcare and pharmaceutical worlds since the 1990s. He also writes about business, law, and tech.
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