New report points out that in 2021, households in the United States threw away 51 million tons of plastic waste . Only 2.4 million tons of these plastics were recycled, just below 5% - while the recycling rate in 2018 was 8.7%.
Greenpeace says that because so little waste is being recycled, none of the plastic packaging used in the United States meets the industry-supported “recyclable” standards. In this report, they examine the benchmarks set in the Allen MacArthur Foundation’s global commitment, which aims to reduce plastic waste by organizations around the world. Big companies such as Apple and Walmart have signed the promise. The Allen MacArthur Foundation says that a plastic to be considered recyclable in practice then it needs to have a 30% recycling rate.
This is far from the amount of plastic actually being reprocessed in the United States - even if it is specifically looking at the two most commonly recycled plastics - plastics used in beverage bottles and ordinary household goods containers. Greenpeace estimates that recycling facilities in the United States have the ability to handle only about 20.9% of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) for beverage bottles. The processing capacity for high-density polyethylene (HDPE) - usually made into milk jugs, shampoo and detergent bottles - has dropped to only 10.3%.
Greenpeace found in a 2020 report that, according to the FTC's "Green Guidelines" for environmental marketing, only some PET and HDPE bottles can legally be marked "recyclable." The guide points out that companies should unconditionally declare their packaging or products “recyclable” only if 60% of consumers have access to recycling facilities. According to Greenpeace, in 2022, 60% of the U.S. population has the opportunity to collect PET and HDPE bottles and jars in cities for recycling. But for polypropylene , which is commonly used in yogurt containers, this ratio dropped to 29%, and plastic cups and plastic trays dropped to 5% and 1% respectively. And, being able to use PET and HDPE recycling facilities does not mean that these products are actually recycled.
Greenpeace analyzed about 370 material recycling facilities in the United States to conduct a survey. The organization's findings build on previous research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which found that plastic recycling rates in the United States had dropped to about 5% in 2019. Promotional groups The Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics also found that the recycling rate in 2021 is still around 5%.
The United States is one of the world's largest plastic pollution countries, and since the huge turnaround occurred in 2018, the United States has been struggling to find out how to deal with its plastic waste. That was in China, where the United States used to ship most of the so-called recyclables there and decided to stop accepting most of the plastic.
Plastic pollution is a global problem, and although decades of marketing aim to transfer responsibility to consumers through recycling, this problem has been around. A 2017 study published in Science Advances found that as of 2015, only 9% of all plastic waste worldwide were recycled. And, because plastic degrades every time, even gadgets made from recycled materials often require reinforcement with new plastics - creating more and more plastic waste.
