For more than half a century, the plastics industry has been touting recycling as the solution to our plastic pollution crisis, yet globally, only 9% of plastic waste has been recycled and 91% has ended up in the environment. That is 5.7 billion tonnes of plastic. It's a huge amount.
Our recycling systems, as Mr. Lee was mentioning earlier, were never designed to handle the volume or complexity of the plastic materials on the market. I think it is short-sighted to assume that we could be able to handle this through recycling and that it is just a waste issue. Frankly, consumers have been told for years that if we just did a better job of putting stuff into the right bin and cleaning things before we put them into the bin, this wouldn't be a problem at all, but it obviously is.
I am particularly concerned about the recurring narrative about chemical recycling saving us from all of this, because the vast majority of chemical recycling systems that exist today are not actually turning plastic into new plastic. They are turning plastic into fuel, and that fuel is then burned, which means that plastics are really only a pit stop in a fossil fuel's existence from extraction to tail pipe.
The priority here really needs to be reducing plastic use overall, and an obvious place to start would be eliminating these unnecessary single-use plastics, including the ones that the government has proposed in its ban.