Why Recycled Plastic Should Give You the Ick.
'cuz it's honestly gross.
“Is recycled plastic safe?” This question came up in one of the community calls in the Green Graphic Design course, and I figured it’d actually be a great Substack. Lots of things are made of recycled plastic now: skincare bottles, clothing, beverage containers, water bottles, etc. It’s a pretty strong marketing pitch right now, oriented around “reducing virgin plastic use”, but is it actually better or even safe to use?
So, /is/ recycled plastic safe?
The short answer is no. This is an area where the research is still being conducted, but the first few studies are starting to come out, alongside the human health impacts of microplastics.
In the study “Unpacking the complexity of the PET drink bottles value chain: A chemicals perspective” published March 2022, concluded that contamination rates for recycled plastic is an area that needs to be researched further, but that in their tests, recycled plastic leeched higher amounts of BPA than virgin plastic, especially in PET plastics, one of the most common recycled plastics.
“Brunel University London identified 150 chemicals in plastic bottles that leached into the bottles’ content. Eighteen of those chemicals exceeded safety regulations, the researchers say.” - GreenQueen Article
How do the the chemicals get there in the first place?
“We found these chemicals can come from various sources, such as the catalysts and additives used during production and degradation during PET production, and degradation that can happen across a bottle’s lifecycle,” Dr. Eleni Iacovidou, a lecturer from Brunel’s centre for pollution research and policy, who led the study, said in a statement.
It gets worse when discussing plastics that have been in the ocean. Marine biologists are currently warning of a "second silent spring” with DDT exposure now coming from ocean plastics.
Plastics are porous and act as a “sponge” for toxins and chemicals in the ocean. Plastics can concentrate toxins like DDT many folds greater than their original concentration. It is nearly impossible to decontaminate plastics that have physically or chemically absorbed these toxins.
An interesting synergy between plastic and other pollutants is that many plastic materials bond other pollutants and concentrate them up to 106-fold relative to their concentration in seawater. - Silent Spring in the Oceans
Right now, most of the research regarding the hazards of microplastic pollution in the ocean and the concentration of DDT in plastics has been on researching the impact on seabirds. Until now, most recycled plastic has been ocean bound or simply just captured through recycling systems.
What is ocean bound plastic anyway?
Test your knowledge!
If you selected “plastic that is in range of the ocean” you’d be correct! Ocean bound plastic is actually NOT at all from beaches or the ocean. According to Ocean Bound Plastic Certified it’s simply plastic that exists within 50km away from the ocean. It doesn’t even have to be headed towards the ocean directly, if the plastic exists within 50km of the ocean it can be certified as “ocean bound”.
Okay, but how substantial is 50km? As it turns out, it hits almost all major cities across the West and East coast of the USA. Large chunks of all plastic used in “ocean bound” plastics are really just plastics just produced in major coastal cities. It takes a bit of the specificity out of the claim, doesn’t it? Here’s 50km mapped onto several major coastal cities in the USA for reference.
To put it in further perspective, globally according to the UN 40% of the world’s population lives within 100km of the ocean.
Coca-Cola is teasing a new bottle of Coke that’s made out of recycled ocean plastic.
Not ocean bound, actual ocean plastic. Yuck. Coca-Cola claims they’ve been able to pull this off with advanced recycling technology that “can recycle previously used plastics of any quality back to the high-quality needed for food or drinks packaging”. They mention their tech can “strip out impurities” but don’t really discuss the logistics of toxins accumulated and whether or not they’re verified to be food-safe through independent testing, but there are a few reasons for this.
The main reason is that this project is just a test, and really just made for good PR. It’s extremely unlikely we will ever see this “advanced recycling tech” ever become a mainstream staple in local recycling systems, or even used at large by Coca-Cola. I can also guarantee, nobody drank from those demo bottles they produced for product photography and their press release. But at the end of the day, it’s simply too expensive to implement. (We’ve had significant access to improved recycling systems for decades, but they cannot bring in the profit needed to keep them operating and justify the cost and are often dismantled. Check out a documentary called ‘Plastic Wars’ if you want to learn more about that).
Also, an important reminder that both Coca-Cola is still the world’s biggest polluter every year for five years running, and also that they actively lobby against more effective recycling in the United States by lobbying against bottle bills which are proven increase recycling rates. They like to promote these PR projects in European countries or other areas that are, notably, not their primary markets where they sell the most product.
Thankfully, we’re all safe from recycled plastic made from ocean plastic, at least for a long while. It was a bit ironic though that this announcement came out on the same day that a study was published showing that microplastics that humans consume through things like plastic water bottles have been demonstrated to cause human cell death, but what can you do, I guess.
But, isn’t it still reducing virgin plastic use?
Unfortunately, not really, not in the long term. Without the extremely fancy lab recycling environments companies like Coca-Cola use to “tease” future “advancements” in recycling, most plastic only downgrades every time it’s recycled. Effectively, the chains of polymers that form to build the plastic get shorter every time it’s recycled. To keep the structure and integrity of the plastic, it has to be re-enforced with virgin plastics: this is why you see a mix of recycled and virgin in most products, unless it’s something relatively flimsy or disposable. You can even see this in the marine bottle above: it’s only 25% ocean plastic. Most recycled plastic is downgraded into clothing which can incorporate the shorter polymer-chain plastic, or eventually things like park benches. Plastic can only be recycled 2-3x before it can no long be used.
Side note: Recycled-plastic clothing is likely safe to wear, however each time you do wear or wash a plastic-based clothing item it sheds up to 700,000 microplastics on every wash cycle, which sucks.
So if it can’t be used for recycling, what else can we do with it?
DEPRESSING FOSSIL FUEL PROPAGANDA
“Climate-Friendly” Biofuel is now going to be made from discarded plastic.
Apparently oil is the solution for fossil fuels companies looking for a way to “recycle and reuse” old plastics. ProPublica and The Guardian recently released a joint publication about the new acceptable biofuels that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved. Chevron has been allowed to produce fuel from old plastics as an “alternative” to petroleum. (Make it make sense?)
Unfortunately, not only are these new fuels ironic because, well, how is petroleum-based plastic fuel supposed to be an alternative to petroleum, it’s extremely dangerous for the general public.
According to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.
Further to this, the article states that “That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.”
Chevron had this to say on the matter:
“plastics are an essential part of modern life and plastic waste should not end up in unintended places in the environment. We are taking steps to address plastic waste and support a circular economy in which post-use plastic is recycled, reused or repurposed.” (excerpt from ProPublica article).
“Circular Economy” is honestly another big vat of greenwashing that only supports the status-quo of capitalism and consumption, but that’s a topic for a different time.
I can only hope that this being exposed in public media causes the EPA to reverse their decision. And I think this is pretty important to know about, even if it is extremely depressing.
If this post made you as angry/depressed as it made me to write, consider sharing it with a friend like ‘what the actual f*ck is going on with recycled plastics’ and pass the badvibes on.
As a palette cleanser, here’s a photo of my cat snuggled with her fox stuffie with her face squashed into her soft bed.
