The Plastic Recycle Myth

 

Coca-Cola will be a major sponsor of the COP27 climate summit starting next week in Egypt.

"This is greenwashing from Coca-Cola, plain and simple, all whilst they fill the ocean with plastic pollution and emit huge volumes of carbon by using virgin oil in their production of plastic packaging," said Amy Slack, head of campaigns and policy for UK-based ocean activists, Surfers Against Sewage.  

Coca-Cola produces around 120 billion oil-based plastic bottles annually, according to anti-plastics campaigners Break Free from Plastics. 

Around 99% of the bottles are produced with fossil fuels, which is worsening climate change and fueling big oil's expansion into plastics amid the clean energy transition, say Greenpeace

400 million tons of plastic waste is created annually, according to the World Economic Forum,

In the US, for example, only around 5% of plastic waste is recycled, noted Greenpeace in a report released last week that calls out the "failed, toxic plastic recycling myth.

The companies that produce it have long claimed that their packaging will soon be largely recyclable or biodegradable. But campaigners question the whole recycling premise.  

"We can't recycle our way out of this mess — we need holistic system change," said Inger Andersen, executive director at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).  

"Corporations like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Unilever have worked with industry front groups to promote plastic recycling as the solution to plastic waste for decades," said Lisa Ramsden, Greenpeace USA Senior Plastics Campaigner. "But the data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable." Ramsden notes that recycling rates are "reducing dramatically" in the US, in part because China stopped accepting North American plastic waste in 2019 — around 7 million tons of it annually.  

So much plastic is being produced that it's anyway "impossible to collect," she added. The hundreds of billions of PET plastic drink bottles produced annually are theoretically recyclable but sorting out PET from diverse and often contaminated plastic waste is not economically viable.  

"The real solution is to switch to systems of reuse and refill," Ramsden said.

 The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) projects that global plastic use and waste will nearly triple by 2060. Even if plastic recycling does increase in that time, global plastic pollution is still expected to double. 

Plastic recycling a 'myth' as packaging explodes – DW – 11/02/2022