Plastics producers are following Big Tobacco’s playbook, and we’re all paying the price 

Marketing can trick us into thinking something in new, shiny packaging is different.  

The tobacco industry has perfected this strategy: Remember when vaping came out as a “healthier” alternative to cigarettes? In reality, it was a new way to hook kids on tobacco products. In fact, more than 2.5 million U.S. middle and high school students are now vaping, with nearly 85 percent of them using flavored products, according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. And now we know the science — this alternative comes with significant health concerns. 

Now, Big Plastic is attempting a similar tactic, with chemical recycling.  

Conventional, or mechanical, recycling of plastics — the kind of recycling we’re all familiar with — has been an abysmal failure, with less than 6 percent of plastics recycled in the United States. Industry knew as early as the 1970s that plastic could never be recycled on a large scale, but it spent decades pushing advertising campaigns to convince the public otherwise so it could avoid efforts to reduce plastic production.   

With consumers and policymakers waking up to the truth of plastic recycling’s failure, plastic producers are taking a page out of Big Tobacco’s playbook: Now, they say, they have a new magic wand called chemical recycling, and it can recycle the plastic that conventional recycling can’t.  

But when you dive into the data around chemical recycling facilities, you find that these processes are even more ineffective, just as harmful to the environment and human health, and just as much a threat to environmental justice communities. 

Chemical recycling, or “advanced recycling,” is using high heat to turn plastic into small amounts of fuels or using toxic chemicals to attempt to make new plastics, generating massive amounts of hazardous waste. There are only 11 constructed chemical recycling facilities in the United States. Many of these facilities are operating at only a pilot or demonstration scale; two closed earlier this year. Even if all 11 facilities were open and operating at full scale, they would handle less than 1.3 percent of U.S. plastic waste.  

For decades, we have been told the breakthrough is right around the corner. It’s not. 

Meanwhile, these facilities release air pollution, generate toxic waste and contribute to the climate crisis. In fact, they use so much energy (usually from fossil fuels) that they can create as much as 100 times more damaging environmental and climate impacts than virgin plastic production. 

Chemical recycling and mechanical recycling are ineffective for largely the same reason: Plastics contain various combinations of roughly 16,000 chemicals. Mixing these different types and melting them all down together can compromise the whole batch of recyclables. So, to recycle plastics, they all have to be very carefully sorted. And there just isn’t a world in which technology can support the recycling of so many different combinations of these chemical-laden plastics. There are too many different chemicals, too many colors and too many different polymers that allow this to actually work. 

While we’re on the topic of those chemicals, it’s important to note that at least 4,200 of them are considered to be “highly hazardous” to human health and the environment. Thousands more haven’t even been tested for their toxicity. Chemicals are known to leach out of plastic into our food, drink and soil; given we’re all currently breathing, eating and drinking plastic, this doesn’t bode well for our health. The impacts of our plastic diet are being discovered every day. Just this year, a study linked plastic to increased risk of heart attack, stroke and premature death in humans.  

The only sensible solution is to stop producing and using so much plastic. There is no recycling our way out of this mess — whether mechanically or chemically.  

The petrochemical and plastics industries are using plastic recycling and chemical recycling as distractions so they can continue to increase their production, with all the harm that goes along with it. Global plastic production is up from 2 million tons in 1950 to roughly 450 million tons today. We are drowning in plastic, and it needs to stop.  

Let’s not fall for another false solution offered by companies to maintain their profit margins. Let’s not allow chemical recycling to win with the same deceptive playbook used by Big Tobacco. We need real change now — and it can’t begin until companies are required by new laws to break their plastic habit and give consumers safe packaged products that don’t threaten the health of people or the planet. 

Judith Enck is a former EPA regional administrator, the president of Beyond Plastics, and sits on the faculty at Bennington College.