It’s embarrassing to admit that I still recycle. When only nine per cent of the world’s plastic gets recycled. Domestically, a whopping four per cent, second lowest only to textiles (also 70 per cent synthetic fibres). Peer into the blue bins’ commingled collection, which we mostly export, and it’s still barely the reason for these numbers.
The average person would now know that contaminated materials cannot be recycled. A fraction may be aware that different types of materials, e.g. PET categories within plastic, cannot be reprocessed together. A minute fraction may understand that even colours need to be segregated, because a few mis-sorted items render the entire batch useless. Even if not plastic, the adhesive of labelling stickers rarely tears off neatly, further sullying whatever unadulterated construct was there to begin with.
Beth Gardiner writes in Plastic Inc. that it is no longer primarily motivated by the need to salvage. Recycling has morphed into a guilt-erasing tool to manage heaps of trash. A deeply complex framework disguised as a disposal issue, as the journalist came to uncover.
We’ve been so distracted by tackling the surmounting waste that we hadn’t stopped to wonder who was making all of this, and why. Who initially lured us with the convenience of disposability, gradually left us with few alternatives and eventually persuaded us to take on the blame for incessant production.
A million bottles purchased every minute. Five trillion plastic bags used each year. Distressing statistics of a mess we feel complicit in, yet powerless to change. More so as takeout utensils are foisted on dine-in meals, and biodegradable cutlery, as I suspected, is not truly biodegradable. Paper cups? Lined with plastic.
But reducing consumption proves inefficient when it’s unavoidable. “Structural problems don't have individual solutions,” writes Cory Doctorow on Pluralistic, “The problem isn't that you have chosen single-use plastics—it's that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics.”
The raw ingredient of polyethylene is a byproduct of petroleum processing, hence its low cost. Interconnected, interdependent industries bank on the product as an answer to the uptake of clean energy and subsequent decline of petrochemicals. Meaning, some of the world’s richest corporations have been pushing this agenda for decades.
While compostables may seem like a good alternative, manufacturing comes at the expense of overharvesting a natural resource. To state the obvious, the solution is not an alternative material—it’s a system.
In 2022, Thailand banned styrofoam and single-use plastics from its national parks to protect its wildlife. Not an end-all, but a start. Singapore rolled out a Tray Return Initiative 13 years ago (you read that right). Eight years later, the country launched the Clean Tables campaign. The tray return rate was 33 per cent. Eight months later, a fine was officially introduced as a penalty. The rate leapt by a good 51 per cent.
In this scenario, change doesn’t start from the ground up. It’s first implemented top-down.
