The Circle Game

 I read an article that referred to plastic recycling as a myth. The plan was to keep all that single use plastic out of the landfills. And the streets. And the oceans. And so on. A new study has found that only about five percent of the plastic used in the United States gets recycled. That's five percent of fifty-one million tons. Each year. That's two and a half million tons getting recycled. So that's the good news. 

That leaves just a tad under forty-nine million tons that does not get recycled. 

Which is a bit confounding, since conservative estimates puts our household at about ten million tons a year. Oakland is fiercely proud of their recycling program, and encourages us all to sort and manage our waste streams, which sometimes can be about as foul as it sounds. Each week I roll a very large bin of assorted material to the curb for what we expect will be a chance for reuse. Carboard, aluminum, plastics of all sorts. All neatly stuffed into a container made of, ironically, plastic. Which makes me think about the George Carlin bit about trying to throw away an old trash can. Where do you put it? When you're done with your old recycling bin, what do you do with it?

Well, if you're a Caven, you might consider using it for holding all manner of gardening implements. Or using it to cover plants in the rare instance of frost in our Oakland climate. But mostly we try to keep it out of the landfill. 

Now, what about everybody and everything else? Plastic soda bottles, one of the most ubiquitous plastic products with the highest recycling rate, are only returned and reused at just over twenty percent. Plastic jugs fared even worse with just ten percent recycling rates. Lisa Ramdsden, senior plastics campaigner for Greenpeace USA says, “The data is clear: practically speaking, most plastic is just not recyclable. Single-use plastics are like trillions of pieces of confetti spewed from retail and fast food stores to over three hundred thirty million U.S. residents across more than three million square miles each year.”

And there I am, at the kitchen sink, holding up a cottage cheese container, squinting to see if that's a one or a seven pressed into the bottom.  Even when you can make out those tiny numbers and they turn out to be the correct one, plastic recycling is inordinately expensive and unlike other products, itcan only be reused once or twice. Some types of plastic are too toxic to be recycled at all. The U.S. remains the biggest producer of plastic waste in the world, generating more than four hundred eighty seven pounds per person each year. 

I'm going to keep separating and sorting my recycling. I'm not going to give up. I'm just going to feel a little more embarrassed about doing so.