Plastic is a key component of modern life. This cheap, tough, yet pliant material is everywhere you look, from kitchen utensils to laptop computers, from drain pipes to the International Space Station. First derived from petroleum in the mid-19th century, its production boomed after World War II, revolutionizing industries and transforming our lives. But we still haven’t figured out its afterlife. Plastic is durable to a fault, persisting for centuries in landfills. It has proven more difficult and expensive to recycle than it is to create. What’s the answer? —Valerie Braylovskiy
Smart Stewardship
We depend on plastic, so we need to manage it responsibly. Plastic doesn’t just enable modern industry; it’s also an industry of its own, supporting nearly two million jobs and shipping over $700 billion in product annually. But disposal is haphazard. Eight million tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year — a truckload every minute. In the wake of revelations that “recycled” plastic was actually being shipped to landfills in Asia, it’s understandable that people don’t trust the process. Still, it’s our best option.
The system is imperfect, but it beats the impact of making new plastic. Most recycling is mechanical, grinding the material and heating it up to melt it into new forms. Our current infrastructure struggles to sort the seven types of plastic resin and handle each one appropriately. Production of new plastic from crude oil or natural gas is worse, on pace to surpass coal in climate-damaging emissions by 2030. A 2019 study by the Association of Plastic Recyclers found that using certain commonly recycled plastics saves up to 88 percent of the energy it would take to make new plastic.
Recycling is a more realistic solution than banning plastic altogether, an extreme measure favored by some environmentalists. The material is simply too ubiquitous and too capable of solving specific problems to be easily eliminated. Any new restrictions on the national level would disrupt supply chains across industries, raise consumer prices generally and complicate access to essentials like sterile medical tools and safe food packaging. Instead of abandoning a flawed system and undoing decades of innovation, we should make it a priority to improve it.
In fact, plastic recycling could become an economic asset with the right investment. Chemical recycling, an emerging field, uses solvents to break plastics down into their basic components. Chemists at Northwestern University recently created a nickel-based catalyst that can even recycle mixed plastics without sorting. Methods like this could curb waste and grow the plastic recycling industry, which is already projected to hit $300 billion by 2035. “The solutions are here today,” writes UBQ Materials chairman and CEO Albert Douer. “What we need is the will to act and the foresight to recognize that the future of waste isn’t disposal. It’s renewal.”
A Costly Myth
Plastic recycling just doesn’t work. Sorting is slow, melting is expensive and the material itself degrades with each reuse. Besides, it relies on volunteer efforts and costly infrastructure that simply aren’t there. Today, after decades of public service announcements, only 15 percent of discarded plastic is collected and 9 percent is recycled, mostly into lower-quality items. And it’s still cheaper to make new plastic. “There is no technology capable of doing what the plastics industry promises, and there is nothing to be gained by pretending one exists,” writes Davis Allen, researcher at the Center for Climate Integrity.
Plastic recycling actually pollutes the environment. For one, consider the emissions from shipping plastic between sorting and processing sites as far away as Malaysia (more than half of the world’s plastic recyclables went to China until that country stopped accepting most waste in 2018). Melting plastic pollutes the air. And chemical recycling often relies on pyrolysis — a high-heat process that mostly produces fuel — which the EPA doesn’t even consider recycling. Rather, it’s classified on a lower tier called “energy recovery.”
Recycling plastic also harms human health. A 2023 study found that a single U.K. recycling facility would discharge up to three million microplastic particles daily into the local wastewater if filtered — 6.5 million pounds if not. These particles can bypass some filters and accumulate inside of the plants around us, the animals we eat and of course the human body. Recycled plastics contain chemicals linked to cancer, infertility and hormone disruption. Nearby communities, often low-income, face the highest risks.
We have a stark choice: live with the impact of plastic, or go without it. Recycling may feel productive, but it doesn’t safely manage our waste. Nearly half of U.S. states have banned single-use plastics like grocery bags. Seven have passed extended producer responsibility laws, which hold companies responsible for the cost of cleaning up after the products they create. “We can’t recycle our way out of the plastic-waste crisis,” says Alexis Goldsmith, national organizing director of nonprofit Beyond Plastics. “We need to require the world’s biggest plastic polluters to reduce the amount of plastic that they’re pumping into the market in the first place.”
This story appears in the December 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.