Plastic Recycling: Myth v. Fact – Part One

As Plastic-free July kicks off, many of us are still unsure about whether recycling single-use plastic bottles and packaging is a viable solution or simply a ‘myth’. At Plastic-free Kinvara, we’ve been tracking this issue since 2018, and since then many startling facts have come to light.

First, investigative reporters in the UK and the US have uncovered evidence that Big Oil executives knew since the 1970s that recycling plastic was not only cumbersome and expensive, it was NOT a viable solution to the mounds of plastic waste that were already accumulating.

To address public outcry, in the 1990s the oil industry designed a symbol called the mobius symbol whose triangle shape and endless arrows were intended to mislead the public into thinking recycling would solve the problem of plastic waste. In fact, it was simply corporate greenwashing, placing responsibility for their product on the shoulders of the public. To understand why plastic recycling is doomed to fail, let’s take a look at where single-use plastic waste goes.

After tossing a single-use plastic bottle into a recycling bin, it gets picked up and trucked to a material recovery facility where it’s sorted, baled, sold as a commodity, and sent to another facility to be sorted by colour, shredded, sanitized, melted down, and moulded into smaller, smoother bits of plastic called nurdles. Finally, those rice-sized bits of your bottle – and millions of others – are purchased again, melted again, and IN THEORY, made into another bottle to be filled with a fruity or fizzy drink.

Join us for Part two tomorrow Morning!!

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