Thread by @zoeschlanger

Morning, today I published a story on the insane fact that only 9% of all plastic produced gets recycled, and the vast majority of single-use plastic in our lives *cannot* be recycled, despite what 40 years of messaging might have you believe qz.com/1738706/the-fu…

Let's start with ants. Yes, ants! They're useful for figuring out how widespread a contaminant is, because they're *everywhere.* Scientists tried to find ants that didn't have plastic additives embedded in their skin. They...couldn't. Not even in the most remote places on Earth.

But how did we get here? Just 60 years ago, plastic hardly existed. In 1955, LIFE magazine ran this image + article, titled “Throwaway Living,” in which a cheerful young white man and woman toss plastic plates and forks into the air. It was all so new and novel.

Plastic is made from oil and gas; it’s a useful petrochemical because it uses parts of the oil + gas production process that were previously considered waste products. Hooray, said the energy companies. Two generations later, and plastic is ubiquitous. qz.com/1738706/the-fu…

The US's fracking boom was also a plastics boom; more natural gas means more ethane (a byproduct), which can be "cracked" to make plastic feedstock. The fracking boom started about 15 years ago. More than half of all plastic ever created was produced in the last 15 years.

The vast majority (>90%) of plastic is not recycled, and even plastic that *is* recycled can often only be recycled once before losing its integrity. The world is just waking up to what that means for our health + environment. But at the same time...

...the petrochemical industry is pivoting *more* towards making plastic, as a way to use a glut of cheap natural gas. In the next five years, the rate of plastic production is expected to increase by another third.

By 2050, it will have tripled.

Tripled!

This new plastic boom is not an indication of consumer interest alone, or even primarily. The glut of new plastics is the result of how cheap it is to make it, buy it, and use it—in part because of the massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.

But, okay, back to recycling:

40% of plastic is made to be single-use. It’s mostly for packaging. It serves a function for six months or less, is used once, and then is thrown away.

And most of it can’t be recycled.

Recyclability depends on there being a market for the recycled material. Let's take plastic film, for example:

Collecting 1 ton of plastic film costs California $5,000. The state can then get about $32 for that same ton on the resale market.

Plastic layered with other materials are often unrecyclable in municipal systems—so, chips bags? Unrecyclable. Plastic packets your face masks come in? Unrecyclable. Etc, etc. Plastic that’s been printed on is often unrecyclable too. Anything besides #1 #2 and #5? Unrecyclable.

So what happens to all this stuff that's not recycled? Most sits in landfills or dumps, gets blown to sea, turns into microplastics, etc. But some is incinerated. Right now, the US burns 6x more plastic than it recycles.

Incineration is a public health hazard. It releases plumes of air pollution, often laced with carcinogens. Who breathes it? 80% of US incinerators are in low income neighborhoods and communities of color.

I could keep going. There's a lot more to cover. Like did you know the packaging industry popularized the concept of a "litterbug," effectively making plastic trash a moralistic individual responsibility, instead of their own corporate responsibility? qz.com/1738706/the-fu…

But I'll just leave one more thing here: We rarely talk about plastic as a climate issue. Recent research found plastics account for 3.8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That's nearly 2x the emissions of the aviation sector.

Plastics add more to climate change than flying

There are ~300 new plastic plants permitted or planned for the US in the near future. Meanwhile China is ramping up plastics production using coal.

Plastic could eat 13% of the Earth’s carbon budget by 2050. The next plastic boom is coming, and it's absolutely a climate issue.

Thanks for tuning in. Lots more info here: qz.com/1738706/the-fu…

Tomorrow I'll talk about solutions. I promise it'll be slightly less gloomy. Sneak preview of that is here: qz.com/1738720/can-de…