In 2022, the world discarded around 268 million tonnes of plastic waste, but just 14 per cent of that – around 38 million tonnes – was recycled, according to a new analysis. The rest was either burned or, more likely, dumped in landfill.
Despite growing concern over the public health and environmental impacts of plastic pollution, the global recycling rate for this material has remained largely stagnant for years. Is it time to admit defeat for plastics recycling?
There is no denying this is a tricky problem to solve. Plastic use has exploded around the world in recent decades, but many countries still lack the collecting, sorting and processing facilities needed to deal with all the rubbish. Only about 27 per cent of plastic waste is even collected and sent for sorting and potentially recycling, and just half that ends up actually getting recycled.
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Part of the problem is that a large proportion of the waste is consumer waste, says at Tsinghua University in China, who worked on the analysis. “Consumer waste, particularly packaging, is a major contributor to the plastic waste problem, accounting for 44 per cent of global plastic use.”
Consumer packaging is cheap and discarded quickly, often only used once before being thrown away. It is expensive for recycling companies to collect and sort, and the sheer variety of plastic types and additives used in packaging makes it tricky to distinguish between what can be recycled and what cannot. Even if an item can be recycled, it is often cheaper for manufacturers to buy virgin plastic instead, eroding the case for investing in new recycling capacity.
Added to this, many countries don’t have the basic infrastructure – kerbside waste collections, for instance – to manage comprehensive recycling systems. It’s not just a problem for low-income nations: in the US, only 5 per cent of plastic waste is recycled, and more than three-quarters is sent to landfill.
“We have this existing large-scale infrastructure of making new plastics, and then a not-so-developed infrastructure for recycling plastics,” says at Imperial College London.
Instead of recycling, increasing numbers of countries are opting to burn their rubbish, with 34 per cent of plastic waste disposed of this way in 2022. In some regions, the proportion is much higher: Japan, China and the European Union, for example, burn 70 per cent, 60 per cent and 38 per cent of their plastic waste respectively.
In some ways, incineration is better than landfill, because it can be used to generate energy – but it releases greenhouse gases in the process. “It’s not a circular use of plastic,” says Brandt-Talbot.
Despite these challenges, we shouldn’t rush to abandon recycling completely. Where countries do have robust systems and supportive policies in place, plastic recycling rates are much higher than the global average. In Japan, the plastic recycling rate is almost 20 per cent, while in China it is 23 per cent.
The key is to get the right mix of regulations, public behaviour and policies in place, says at the University of Birmingham, UK. “It is a global problem. But each country has its own waste management systems, its own policies around plastic management and waste,” he says. “It’s a global problem with local solutions.”
Yet even with perfect collection and sorting systems, there is a limit to what can currently be achieved. So many different types of plastics are being churned out every day, and only a small fraction can be recycled, Dove points out. “We’ve been developing plastics quite happily for 70-odd years, optimising them, making them better and more complicated to do more things,” he says. “And what we have not been doing at the same rate is developing the end-of-life treatments.”
The good news is that progress is being made, says Dove. New technologies are unlocking routes to chemical recycling, for example, where plastics are broken down into their original chemical building blocks. “The public, policy-makers and scientists now care enough about this that new technologies are going to be developed, scaled and implemented,” he says. “You are seeing a lot more technologies come through that are focused on the sorting problems, on simplifying what we are making to get the same performance from more simple plastics, and then on recycling complicated and mixed materials.”
It may take patience, but these innovations should start to push the global recycling rate higher, he believes. In the meantime, if you are in a country with a good recycling system, keep putting those drinks bottles and yogurt pots out for collection.
Nature Communications Earth & Environment
