Misunderstandings of Recycling Vol.1
What if recycling plastic didn’t exist, would you still use plastics?
The reality is only 9% of plastic has ever been recycled. Yes, you can say recycling plastic almost doesn’t exist.
I saw this news recently and I was confused!
“California recently became the first state to restrict the use of the "chasing arrows" symbol. State lawmakers passed a bill that criminalizes putting the symbol on any item that isn’t commonly recycled as determined by the state’s environmental regulator.”
Wait… Is the “chasing arrow" the recycling symbol?! So the recycling symbol was misleading us? How long have we been fooled by the symbol, then?
So what exactly is the symbol? You often see the chasing arrows with numbers in the middle on plastic materials and you would think “Oh! Recyclable!” But actually not true. Just because something could be recycled doesn’t mean it will be recycled.
The symbol is in the public domain which means anyone can use the symbol. And it really means “recyclable" which doesn't necessarily mean that it is accepted by your local recycling program. I would say this means, “Sure, you can recycle it, it is just incredibly hard and very expensive to do the recycling process so no one would bother. So we only pick some kinds of plastic to recycle”
Take a look at the “chasing arrow” symbol on any package. You will see a number in the symbol which could be 1 to 7, and that is called a Resin Identification Code. Because there are 7 types of plastics you can categorize in types. Most of the time only two kinds of plastics get recycled: 1 - PETE and 2 - HDPE. And the rest, most likely go straight to landfill. (check out to see the rest of Resin Identification Codes on Vol.2)
Now you know the truth of these symbols. I wonder who decided to put these confusing and somehow misleading symbols to every plastic and why.
The original recycling symbol was designed in 1970 by a University student for a competition during America's first Earth Day. As we know, those arrows represent Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
Around this time, citizens started to be concerned about the environment.
In the 1980's, plastic went out of control. And manufacturers had to do something. Do they take the responsibility and protect the environment? Or the opposite…
In 1989, oil and plastics organizations quietly began a campaign to pressure almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic to make it look like all the plastics were recyclable.
It was all planned. Around 1990, The nation's largest oil and gas companies, which are also the plastics industry, spent millions of dollars for ads on TV telling the American public to use plastics and recycle. What’s behind it? To make people feel less concerned about the environment. It is all about their own marketing and the “recycling” part was a lie. They actually knew it is too expensive to recycle plastics that time and most of the plastics they produced wound up either burning or burned. Making plastic out of oil is much cheaper than recycling plastic.
Now, the oil industry makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year making plastic. Yes, their marketing plan worked.
We still haven't found the solution to this humongous plastic trash problem and more and more and MORE plastics are on the way filling up the earth.
Recycling is great but even though plastics get recycled, most likely they can't be reused more than once or twice because once it is used, it degrades to some degree and loses quality.
Recycling shouldn’t be the first choice to protect our environment. We should avoid using plastic as much as we can.