A false solution
It's time to get real about plastic recycling – or lack thereof

I’m a dedicated recycler. I fret when I see people throwing garbage in with soda cans and empty water bottles. I’ve even been known to rescue recyclables from the trash – at my house, for sure, but also in public places if I think nobody’s looking. 

Granted, the success of recycling plastic is abysmal – the U.S. rate is roughly 7% – but in theory it can be done. So, I was delighted when I learned that Tucson, where I live, was starting a pilot program to deal with hard-to-recycle plastics. 

These aren’t the containers that we can recycle curbside, numbers 1, 2 and 5, or even the bags we can take to stores for recycling. Hard-to-recycle plastics are everything else: caps and lids, food packaging, straws, all those little pieces of plastic too small for machines to deal with and all those other numbers that curbside and stores don’t take. 

Tucson’s pilot program would take all of it, and a company called ByFusion would use steam and compression to press it into blocks – ugly blocks, in my opinion – but useful for making benches, counters, even tiny homes. The blocks would avoid tons of marine debris and carbon dioxide along the way. Count me in!

Within months, participation in the pilot program exceeded expectations. ByFusion couldn’t handle all the plastic that was coming in. The city began storing the excess plastic and brought a second company into the loop: Hefty, a plastic-bag manufacturer. 

Suddenly, the rules changed. The Hefty ReNew program was a collaboration between Reynolds Consumer Products, a manufacturer of various plastic products, and Dow Chemical Co. Now participants were asked to buy orange Hefty bags to collect their hard-to-recycle plastics. And what would Hefty do with all the plastic that ByFusion couldn’t handle?

Hefty was doing different things with plastic waste in different cities – making plastic lumber in Omaha, burning it for cement kiln fuel and “advanced recycling” in Atlanta. But when I asked a city official about Tucson’s plan, I got no response about the fate of our plastic waste.

Meanwhile, the more I learned about advanced recycling – aka pyrolysis – the less I liked it. Pyrolysis burns plastic to make fuel, and a 2023 report by two nonprofit environmental advocacy groups, Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, found that the pyrolysis process was “inefficient, energy-intensive and contributes to climate change.” 

Yet Kevin Greene of the nonprofit Sustainable Tucson said there’s a good chance a portion of our plastic waste will end up at a pyrolysis plant under construction in Eloy, a small town halfway between Tucson and Phoenix.  

Meanwhile, many pro-recycling people are calling plastic recycling in all its forms a “false solution” that mainly serves to relieve consumer guilt. In September, the California attorney general followed environmental groups in suing ExxonMobil for its “campaign of deception” around plastic recycling – one that has led people to buy more single-use plastics. ExxonMobil has since counter-sued. 

There’s a growing realization that plastic is not so much a waste problem as it is a problem at its source. It creates health impacts in the low-income communities where the plastics are made, along with communities where those plastics are burned. 

Until I learned more about pyrolysis, I too had felt relieved of guilt. So relieved, in fact, that in recent months I’d noticed myself making different, though small, consumer choices that left me using more plastic than before, each time thinking, I can orange-bag this!

It turns out I’m not alone. A 2016 behavioral economics study found that when consumers think their waste might be recycled, they worry less about the amount of trash they generate and produce more of it.

Ideally, we’d do it all: reduce the flow of virgin plastic and deal responsibly with the glut of plastic waste, including pervasive microplastics that we humans have already choked the planet with. 

But we don’t seem to have the mental bandwidth to do that. Like a growing number of folks, I’ve concluded that instead of recycling plastic, we need to focus on phasing out its use everywhere we can.

For now, I’ve got a boxful of orange Hefty bags under my sink – yours if you want them. 

Karen Mockler is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues. She is a writer in Tucson.