For The Washington Post

RUSSIA-US-DIPLOMACY-BASKET-COURT

Contributor

The Washington Post

(Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post)

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-LAMOTT

Sonia Sotomayor,Clarence Thomas,John Roberts,Samuel Alito,Elena Kagan,Amy Coney Barrett,Neil Gorsuch,Brett Kavanaugh,Ketanji Brown Jackson,Michael Dreeben

Children holding hands

ONE TIME USE FOR OP-CARNEY KIDS 

FEDERALISTGALA

Four Dalmatian Puppy

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

Israel Palestinians Campus Protests

US-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-EDUCATION-CONFLICT

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-SMITH-HIGHER-ED

Former U.S. President Trump's criminal trial on charges of falsifying business records continues in New York

POOL

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

How Trump’s allies amplify his Truth Social messages to the wider world

Indy Star bars columnist from Caitlin Clark’s games after awkward exchange

The Washington Post wins three Pulitzer Prizes

Nats go over .500 the hard way by beating the O’s and Corbin Burnes

A look at what has changed since the Nationals were last above .500

Baseball can crush rookies. Why hasn’t it crushed Trey Lipscomb?

Postal worker finds WWII-era letters, drives 5 hours to deliver them

Strangers help Sesame Street puppeteer after heirloom necklace was stolen

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

RFK Jr’s ‘history lesson’ on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine flunks the fact test

The Trump-Biden battle over the 2017 tax cut

That time football legend, rig-driving eligible bachelor Biden was arrested

The FTC’s noncompete clause rule goes too far

The next global crisis could come from the sun. We should prepare now.

Russia is using toxic chemical weapons, wrecking a ban it helped create

No, posting is not better political activism than talking to voters

The legal — and political — stakes of Stormy Daniels on the stand

Commerce Department revokes more export licenses to China’s Huawei

Middle East conflict live updates: Israel says it has reopened key aid crossing; U.S. paused bomb shipments to Israel

U.S. signals optimism for Gaza cease-fire as Israel moves into Rafah 

Carolyn Hax: Family pushes siblings to ‘make amends’ after their mother’s death

Miss Manners: I’m offended by a golfer’s skirt choice

Ask Amy: I want to be closer with my brother. He never reaches out to me.

Substack courts TikTokers with new ‘creators’ program

Indiana primary updates: Mike Braun wins Republican governor race

France tries to shed its rude reputation ahead of the Olympics

Don’t be a jerk at the airport: A guide for headphones

The new cure-all for vacation excess: the IV drip 

In photos: The scene after a deadly tornado strikes Oklahoma

Fashion previews, protests, parties: The scene surrounding the Met Gala

US-VOTE-POLITICS-ECONOMY-BIDEN

SERGIO FLORES

Eve O. Schaub is the author of “Year of No Garbage: Recycling Lies, Plastic Problems, and One Woman’s Trashy Journey to Zero Waste.”

The time has come for us to stop “recycling” plastic. Plastic as a material is not recyclable, and the very best thing we can do to celebrate Earth Day this year is to acknowledge that fact.

This seems counterintuitive, I know. We’ve been told for decades that the answer to the plastic-waste crisis is more, better recycling: If only we sorted better! If only we had better access to recycling technologies! If only we washed and dried our plastics more adequately! This is all a smokescreen, designed to distract us from the truth that plastic recycling — if by “recycling” we mean converting a used material into a new material of similar value and function — is a myth.

Unlike paper, glass and metal, plastic is not easily, efficiently turned into new products. What passes for “recycling” plastic is costly, energy-intensive and toxic. On top of all that, the process requires the addition of <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/marc.202000415" target="_blank">a shocking amount of new virgin plastic</a> — around 70 percent — to hold the newly formed plastic item together. As a result, <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5eda91260bbb7e7a4bf528d8/t/62b2238152acae761414d698/1655841666913/The-Real-Truth-about-the-US-Plastic-Recycling-Rate-2021-Facts-and-Figures-_5-4-22.pdf" target="_blank">only about 5 percent</a> of plastic gets “recycled” (or, more accurately, “downcycled” into a product of inferior quality). Compare that with a <a href="https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/national-overview-facts-and-figures-materials#:~:text=In%202018%2C%20the%20rate%20of,24.4%20million%20tons)%20in%202017" target="_blank">68 percent recycling rate</a> for paper and cardboard.

Considering that, as a society, we’ve been actively trying to get better at plastic recycling since the 1970s, 5 percent represents a colossal, unequivocal failure. It tells us that plastic “recycling” is, at heart, an empty, performative gesture.

Many environmentalists will protest this assertion. They might correctly point out that plastics labeled with the resin identification code of 1 or 2 (the number inside the “chasing arrows” triangle on many plastics) have a higher measure of recycling success: <a href="https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data" target=_blank>about 30 percent</a>. Shouldn’t we support recycling at least this plastic?

But this brings us to another myth: that plastic is harmless to human health. What many people do not know is that plastic is made from two ingredients: fossil fuels and toxic chemicals. When we say toxic chemicals, we are talking about some very bad actors: heavy metals, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/24/pfas-all-about-forever-chemicals-and-why-us-eu-are-targeting-them/c4426f2a-4291-11ee-9677-53cc50eb3f77_story.html" target="_blank">per- and polyfluoroalkyl</a> substances (PFAS), flame retardants and persistent organic pollutants. Tens of thousands of proprietary chemical formulas are involved in the production of plastic, most of which have never been tested for their effects on human health, although many are known to be endocrine disruptors, fertility inhibitors and carcinogens.

What this means is that even if we were to get better at recycling plastic, we shouldn’t want to. When you grind up, melt and re-form a bunch of plastic (with the addition of lots of new virgin plastic to bind it together), all those thousands of toxic plastic chemicals combine to make a Frankenstein material that has what scientists call “non-intentionally added substances” in it. Which is to say that chemicals that are not supposed to be there start showing up. A study last year <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340923008090?via%3Dihub" target=_blank>concluded that recycled plastics</a> contain “an unknown number of chemical compounds at unknown concentrations.” In 2021, <a href="https://www.plasticsmarkets.org/jsfcontent/ECCC_Food_Grade_Report_Oct_2021_jsf_1.pdf" target=_blank>a Canadian study</a> concluded that plastic is “not suitable for processing into food grade PCR,” referring to post-consumer resin.

The upshot? You do not want your food wrapped in recycled, mystery-ingredient plastic.

But what if we use recycled plastic only for nonfood items such as picnic benches? Then we have yet another deeply troubling aspect of plastic to deal with: microplastics. We’ve been hearing more and more about these lately, because scientists are finding them everywhere they look — in the environment and in the human body.

The chemical composition of all plastic — whatever the type — is a synthetic polymer that doesn’t break down or go away, ever. Instead, it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces until it turns into microplastics or even nanoplastics. These tiny particles are still plastic, still toxic, but now so small that we are eating and breathing them all the time. Microplastics have been discovered in human lungs, bloodstream and breastmilk, as well as in the placenta of unborn babies. Scientists have found microplastics in sperm, testes and the brain.

The effect of all this plastic in our bodies is still being revealed, but we know it is substantial. <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jes/article/8/2/bvad163/7513992?login=false" target=_blank>A recent study</a> concluded that the disease burden from plastic exposure includes preterm birth, obesity, heart disease and cancer, and the health-care cost was $249 billion in 2018 alone. The human body has become the trash can of our plastics-addicted culture.

Trying to recycle plastic makes the microplastics problem even worse. A<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772416623000803" target=_blank> study of just one plastics recycling facility</a> discovered that it might be washing 3 million pounds of microplastics into its wastewater every year — all of which ends up being deposited in our city water systems or dumped into the environment.

At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least.

Then we need to get to work on the real solution: making a whole lot less of it.

Eve O. Schaub

washpost

Stop recycling plastic this Earth Day

the-washington-post

US-POLLUTION-PLASTIC-CHEMICAL-RECYCLING

AFP via Getty Images

(Getty Images)

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.