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Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work
If the plastics industry is following the tobacco industry’s playbook, it may never admit to the failure of plastics recycling.
Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.
Recycling in general can, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the .
