I support environmental efforts to reduce climate change, global warming, and waste in general. But to ensure the limitations of our harmful impact, we have to go against the norm of a widespread practice that isn’t working. Recycling. We all have been told this helps the planet because for every plastic, metal, and cardboard waste that gets sent to the waste management disposal facility after our weekly pickup, our garbage is created into something new and useful. This just isn’t the case. This is the biggest myth the entire planet has accepted. Recycling is a lie.
To first understand why recycling doesn’t work and how it harms our environment, not necessarily as bad as pollution or dumping garbage on the side of the street, we have to accept the fact this current system was created by the plastic industry itself. The plastics industry is a billion-dollar industry. The market value for 2022 is reported at 609.01 billion. The industry isn’t going to change despite making never-ending public service announcements, slogans, and advertisements on television, radio, or online, even on billboards that say they are making changes to help the environment and their commitment to zero waste, etc. But they won’t. They have the money to make things better. But nothing is going to compel them to do so. Not the government, the law, or even the general public. Majority of the plastic that we throw away or at least picked up from our curbs by garbage trucks are just lying around in landfills despite pledges in millions, even billions of dollars invested in such programs and initiatives.
NPR and PBS’ Frontline released a joint report in 2020 that the oil industry misled the public for decades. They knew about it since the 70s. The industry told us all that we can recycle all unused and unneeded plastic, while it creates more plastic which will end up right where we started. So, the only thing that is being recycled is newer plastic waste ending up in landfills with old plastic waste. Creating garbage for garbage. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2018 less than ten percent of plastic was recycled. Only 3,090 tons out of the total of 35,680 tons generated for the whole year. And on top of this recycling plastic is more expensive than the industry has let on. Exxon, Chevron, Dow, and DuPont are expanding their plastic production operations with production to be tripled by 2050. And it's unlikely they will stop anytime. Because they have no incentive to do since it goes against a large chunk of their business model. And thanks to their efforts in lobbying and forming trade groups, the federal government has just sided with their false promises despite no effort to investigate and verify if they are serious about making the environment better. The government has been limited in its capacity to do so making some of us feel that the EPA isn’t there to do its job when we all know it's necessary for them to enforce such measures. It’s literally in their name. But all progress gets stalled because of lobbying. Lobbying is the great cancer on our government and political institutions.
Just recently Greenpeace published a report on October 24 making it clear the ability to recycle plastic for environmental benefit is not working. Data collected in May found that less than five percent of plastic is getting recycled and they expect the number to get lower. Greenpeace found that not a single plastic material, including soda bottles, met the “threshold” to be considered recyclable per the standards of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative. The Foundation’s standard for plastic to be considered recyclable means that it must have a recycling rate of 30 percent. And not a single type or kind of plastic has reached that rate nor even close enough for recycling or reuse. Whether or not you consider Greenpeace or the Foundation credible, we have to admit the problem has gotten out of hand. Big Oil lied and even evaded regulations for plastic pellets causing more harm. And in turn, we all fell for it because it was easy to dismiss such a concern since our lives are not held hostage at the time to such concerns.
Recycling can be avoided in one way which is to reuse all plastic material we have in our possession. The reality is we don’t want any of it. For instance, plastic bottles for water, soda, and juice have in our minds, a limited purpose. We see the plastic bottle of water and give only the value of the water in the bottle. Once that well dries up and nourishes our thirst, we don’t need it anymore. And how could we? When there are millions more out of there in the world created for that exact purpose. Plastic wrapping is a big nothing once we undo a package we ordered from Amazon or some other online retailer. The wrapper and package material no longer has value anymore unless it's for a return which is getting quite rare these days.
We need to end the production of all single-use plastic materials. And many cities, states in the U.S., and even countries are phasing out such material by law. Bans on plastic bags have been passed in 94 countries. This is a great start to the endemic of the disease of plastic which keeps growing. But there is a way to minimize just not the amount of plastic that gets thrown away, but for all garbage regardless of the capacity to be recycled.
The solution is to burn our garbage. I don’t mean by burn pits or doing it on your grill in the backyard. There is a safer solution. And one that creates a better use of energy than anything else we have read and dissected so far. All we have to do is take all of our garbage and burn them in what is known as Waste to Energy facilities. These facilities are a better alternative to the current system of garbage going nowhere and ending up in landfills. More so than just saying we should separate our trash even further. All those color-coded bins and number-type plastics are just adding to the problem instead of solving it. The same goes for separating metal, boxes, wire hangers, and even food waste.
Waste to energy is quite simple. These plants burn municipal waste also known as everyday trash items. Some may be industrial waste or hazardous waste. But these latter two are a rare exception. These plants sort out material before burning it and can co-exist with recycling. The only items that are burned are not recyclable, by design or economically, and are not hazardous. Not all plants operate the same with regards to the amount of waste that is destroyed, size of the waste, and time taken to burn between each round, but all burn somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of waste it receives. Another factor is the design of the plant. The recycling efforts of WTE plants are doing a better job than what we have. At least in these plants, it's not sitting around when it's supposed to be reprocessed for a better purpose.
They are by far a cheaper solution. Plants with the capacity of 400 GWh energy production annually cost about 440 million dollars to build. But even for plants with a different energy production function also cost around the same as one with 400 GWh energy production annually. And the amount of energy these plants can produce is somewhere in the range of 500 to 600 kWh of electricity per ton of waste incinerated. Thus, the incineration of about 2,200 tons per day of waste will produce about 1,200 MWh of electrical energy.
Pollution from these plants is extremely rare and its incineration impact is much healthier on human and environmental health. While they cause less air pollution than coal plants, but a little more than natural gas ones. At the same time, it is carbon-negative: processing waste into fuel releases considerably less carbon and methane into the air than having waste decay away in landfills or the lake. Odor pollution has become a problem with several plants while generally WTE plants produce fly ash and bottom ash. The total amount of ash produced by waste-to-energy plants ranges from 15% to 25% by weight of the original quantity of waste, and the fly ash amounts to about 10% to 20% of the total ash. And while it’s normal to be concerned with the amount of ash it emits, generally speaking, it’s a smaller price to pay for the massive amount of pollution we live throughout our daily lives seeing trash on sidewalks, lakes, rivers, ponds, beaches, parks, you name it. A simple fix for the odor pollution is to add the waste in an enclosed area with negative pressure, which prevents unpleasant odors from escaping, and the air drawn from the storage area is sent through the boiler or a filter.
Tragically, we don’t have many to go around. Per EPA numbers from a 2015 report, only 75 Waste to Energy plants exist in the United States. While landfills still exist throughout the country, our communities have become them for many years. Countries in Europe that have these plants also have the highest rate of recycling and over there it is working. The same can apply here in the U.S. We need to reinvest money into building more of these plants as they’re expected to grow within this decade. From 2018 to 2026, the waste-to-energy industry is going to see a seventy percent increase. And more power to it. Quite literally.
It’s clear the more waste we produce, it’s actually going to be recycled by these plants for the benefit of the environment. The first step to take, is we need to end laws mandating recycling and instead mandate all trash goes for the purpose of waste to energy.
We all have a responsibility to limit the amount of garbage we produce. Zero Waste is not a viable solution, but we can do better than the current system.
Banning plastic items only go so far. Burning all trash to create energy goes a lot further.