How Recycling Can Be Bad For The Environment

Wait… what… how? It's everywhere, this push to "go green," to be eco-friendly, to reduce, reuse, recycle. We as a society have made major changes to live up to it, and before you misunderstand: we like recycling. We like it a lot. (Please read carefully, and if you get triggered, don't send us angry emails or messages. We're busy cleaning up the trash mentioned in this blog.)

But, like everything, you can't go into it blind. Recycling that doesn't actually get recycled is just called trash, and it goes right into the landfill like anything else. Here's how to not let that happen.

The cracks in recycling

The problem is that the message is one-sided: "It doesn't matter if you buy too much and waste a lot. Just recycle and it'll all even out!"

Unfortunately, recycling isn't a one-stop shop to wash away your sins. Waste is still waste. What recycling programs should be teaching us is how to reduce consumption across the board.

It's still a good idea to recycle waste and to design products and packaging to be recycled. That's what we call a "closed loop." But it's more complicated in practice than in theory. In its modern form, recycling has unintentionally thrown a Hail Mary to large corporations. If you're shopping for disposable razors, aren't you more likely to buy the one that says "eco-friendly" or "made with recycled materials"? Probably, because it eases your guilt. And we love easing our guilt.

So recycling gives manufacturers an out. They can use environmental consciousness as a marketing technique and, boom, sales go through the roof. Everybody wins, except the planet. Whoops.

Plastic is mostly downcycled

Here's the inconvenient truth: most plastic isn't truly recycled into the same thing again. It's downcycled.

Downcycling means turning waste into new materials or products of lower quality. AKA, just like a Full House reunion: you can try, but it'll never be as good as it once was.

Need an example? Take a clear water bottle. It's made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which we obviously expect you to pronounce correctly the first time. That bottle can be recycled, but it often comes back as fleece or carpet fiber instead of another bottle. Think of it as a water bottle reincarnation.

The numbers

According to the EPA, only about 8.7% of plastics in the US were recycled in 2018. Even PET bottles and jars, among the most recycled plastics, had a recycling rate of only about 29%, which means most still ended up in the trash.² Globally, of all plastic waste ever generated through 2015, only about 9% was recycled.¹

Recycling also takes energy, collection and transport. For most materials, it beats the landfill, but the lowest-impact option is not creating the waste in the first place.

Where does it all go?

Recycling can hurt the environment mostly because of the mindset it gives us: the idea that irresponsible consumption is erased as long as we recycle. But when you recycle something, it doesn't just disappear.

For nearly three decades, the US shipped much of its recycling to China, where it was sorted and remade into new products. Then, in 2018, China's National Sword policy sharply restricted imports of recyclables, citing contamination and its own growing waste. Recyclables piled up in the US, and many cities scaled back their programs or sent more to landfills.³

Where do we go from here? Be cognizant.

Be a conscious consumer. The more aware we are of the issues around recycling, the better our choices become. Is it a little more work? Is it slightly uncomfortable? Yes. But in this case, ignorance isn't bliss. It's turning a blind eye to our planet and hoping someone else picks up the slack. If we all do that, we'll soon face a problem that can't be ignored.

Again, if this blog triggered you to the point of wanting to send us an angry message, don't bother. We love productive dialogue, but a few bad apples have ruined that, so please put your energy into helping to clean up instead. You can see every cleanup we've run since 2017.

Try to reduce. Try to reuse. And then, finally, recycle. Here's how we're reducing plastic in our own packaging.