Recycling solves the plastic problem

What actually happened

The number comes from Roland Geyer, Jenna Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law's 2017 paper in Science Advances, the first full accounting of every plastic ever made. Of roughly 8.3 billion tonnes produced through 2015, about 9 percent had been recycled, and much of that only once before being discarded. The OECD's Global Plastics Outlook has since put the current global rate around 9 percent as well, so it has not moved.

The reasons are structural rather than about your sorting habits. Plastic degrades when reprocessed, so it is usually downcycled into a lower-grade product rather than recycled into itself. Different resins cannot be melted together and sorting is expensive. Virgin plastic from cheap petroleum is usually cheaper than recycled feedstock, which removes the buyer. Only PET (1) and HDPE (2) have meaningful markets at all. When China's National Sword policy stopped accepting foreign waste in 2018, many Western municipal programs simply started landfilling material they had collected as recycling.

The uncomfortable part is documented. Reporting by NPR and PBS Frontline in 2020, based on industry archives, found that plastics manufacturers promoted recycling in the 1980s and 1990s while internal documents acknowledged it was unlikely to be economically viable. The chasing-arrows symbol with a resin number, which schools taught as a recycling grade, was industry-designed and mostly just identifies the plastic type. Reduce and reuse were always the load-bearing words in that slogan.