Why recycling isn’t enough to address the plastic problem

I remember using a princess toothbrush when I was little. The handle was purple, teal, and sparkly. Like most of the other pieces of plastic that have ever been made, it's probably still out there somewhere, languishing in a landfill. (I just hope it's not in the ocean.)

I've been thinking about that toothbrush again this week after UN talks about a plastic treaty broke down on Friday. Nations had gotten together to try and write a binding treaty to address plastic waste, but negotiators left without a deal.

Plastic is widely recognized as a huge source of environmental pollution-again, I'm wondering where that toothbrush is-but the material is also a contributor to climate change. Let's dig into why talks fell apart and how we might address emissions from plastic.

I've defended plastic before in this newsletter (sort of). It's a wildly useful material, integral in everything from glasses lenses to IV bags.

But the pace at which we're producing and using plastic is absolutely bonkers. Plastic production has increased at an average rate of 9% every year since 1950. Production hit 460 million metric tons in 2019. And an estimated 52 million metric tons are dumped into the environment or burned each year.

So, in March 2022, the UN Environment Assembly set out to develop an international treaty to address plastic pollution. Pretty much everyone should agree that a bunch of plastic waste floating in the ocean is a bad thing. But as we've learned over the past few years, as these talks developed, opinions diverge on what to do about it and how any interventions should happen.

One phrase that's become quite contentious is the full life cycle" of plastic. Basically, some groups are hoping to go beyond efforts to address just the end of the plastic life cycle (collecting and recycling it) by pushing for limits on plastic production. There was even talk at the Assembly of a ban on single-use plastic.

Petroleum-producing nations strongly opposed production limits in the talks. Representatives from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait told the Guardian that they considered limits to plastic production outside the scope of talks. The US reportedly also slowed down talks and proposed to strike a treaty article that references the full life cycle of plastics.

Petrostates have a vested interest because oil, natural gas, and coal are all burned for energy used to make plastic, and they're also used as raw materials. This stat surprised me: 12% of global oil demand and over 8% of natural gas demand is for plastic production.

That translates into a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. One report from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that plastics production accounted for 2.24 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019-that's roughly 5% of the global total.

And looking into the future, emissions from plastics are only set to grow. Another estimate, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, projects that emissions from plastics could swell from about 2 billion metric tons to 4 billion metric tons by 2060.

This chart is what really strikes me and makes the conclusion of the plastic treaty talks such a disappointment.

Recycling is a great tool, and new methods could make it possible to recycle more plastics and make it easier to do so. (I'm particularly interested in efforts to recycle a mix of plastics, cutting down on the slow and costly sorting process.)

But just addressing plastic at its end of life won't be enough to address the climate impacts of the material. Most emissions from plastic come from making it. So we need new ways to make plastic, using different ingredients and fuels to take oil and gas out of the equation. And we need to be smarter about the volume of plastic we produce.

One positive note here: The plastic treaty isn't dead, just on hold for the moment. Officials say that there's going to be an effort to revive the talks.

Less than 10% of plastic that's ever been produced has been recycled. Whether it's a water bottle, a polyester shirt you wore a few times, or a princess toothbrush from when you were a kid, it's still out there somewhere in a landfill or in the environment. Maybe you already knew that. But also consider this: The greenhouse gases emitted to make the plastic are still in the atmosphere, too, contributing to climate change.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.