Let’s stop pretending we are going to recycle all this plastic

Environment and Climate Editor

Thereport in this newspaper that Australia stands no chance of reaching its goal of recycling 70 per cent of its plastic waste by 2025 is at once depressing and predictable.

Most of our single-use plastics cannot be recycled into a useful product at a reasonable cost. As voters and consumers we keep pretending it can,because we like plastic. It is cheap and useful.

Australia stands no chance of reaching its goal of recycling 70 per cent of its plastic waste by 2025.

Australia stands no chance of reaching its goal of recycling 70 per cent of its plastic waste by 2025.Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

So governments and industry go along with the charade,providing us with pantomime recycling efforts.

In turn,petrochemical companies,facing the end of the fossil fuel era,happily increase production.

You need only compare the economics of recycling streams to get a sense of how useless most of our waste plastic is.

Most metals and glass can be recycled endlessly,exhibiting the same quality in each of its new lives. That’s why people pay for scrap metal,while we had to pay China to take our waste plastic.

In 2017,China finally tired of taking the world’s plastic waste and banned new imports,leaving the rest of us to scramble to find something to do with our growing stockpiles.

In Australia,we have seen the collapse of REDcycle,the nation’s largest waste recycling scheme,with admissions that thousands of tonnes of warehoused plastic is bound for landfill.

In Europe,much of it is burned for energy in machines that might not release particulate pollution but do release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – burning plastic is after all burning oil.

In other parts of the world,plastic simply chokes rivers and seas and the creatures that live in them.

The New South Wales environment watchdog has issued ‘clean-up’ orders to the supermarket giants for 15 warehouses and storage depots around the state where soft plastics have been stockpiled.

Whether plastic is dumped under the ground or into the ocean,or burnt for energy,all plastic will eventually end up as a greenhouse gas.

In fact,according to analysis published in February by the Minderoo Foundation in conjunction with the global energy analysis firm Wood McKenzie,the climate consultancy Carbon Trust and KPMG,single-use plastics now generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as the United Kingdom.

Minderoo’s second Plastic Waste Makers Index found growth in single-use plastics made from fossil fuels was 15 times that of recycled plastics,and that between 2019 and 2021 global use of them surged from 133 million tonnes per year to 139 million tonnes,or about 1 kilogram per person on earth.

ExxonMobil remains the largest producer of polymers bound for single-use plastics – responsible for six million tonnes in 2021 – followed by China’s Sinopec,which produced 5.8 million tonnes,and US-based Dow third.

Growth in single-use plastics production was driven by demand for flexible packaging such as films and sachets,which grew from a 55 per share of all single-use plastics in 2019,to 57 per cent in 2021.

When the report was published Minderoo chairman Andrew Forrest called for governments to introduce a “polymer premium” – a price per kilo of virgin plastics produced,with the funds raised to be used for developing new recycling infrastructure.

Until such infrastructure does exist,we should at least stop pretending that the plastics we so readily discard can ever easily be recycled.

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Nick O'Malley is National Environment and Climate Editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is also a senior writer and a former US correspondent.

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