Environmental Concerns for Plastic Recycling

It seems as though everyone is into recycling these days, and for good reason: It helps the environment and helps preserve our rapidly dwindling resources. One premise behind recycling is to reduce the waste in our landfills, but not all of recycling is good for us or the environment. In particular, there are many concerns about plastic recycling. It is now thought that it may not only be a hazard to our environment but a hazard to our health also.

Recycling Pros

• There are many reasons to recycle plastic; one of the most compelling is that plastic takes a long time to degrade, so it fills our landfills at a much faster rate than it decomposes. Another reason to recycle plastic is that to burn plastic can release toxic fumes into the air, causing illness. And recycled plastic can be turned into many useful items.

Health Issues

• Recycling plastic is costly and labor-intensive; there is no profit in it. Since the companies who recycle plastic don't make a lot of money from it, the workers also are paid low wages. Most of our recycling is sent to China, a country that is not as well equipped as we are to handle the toxic fumes from melted plastic. Even in American recycling centers, toxic fumes inevitably enter the atmosphere.

Misconceptions

• While recycling plastic is a great idea in theory, a number of practical issues make it less than perfect in practice. For one, even plastics placed in curbside recycling bins may be turned into secondary products that are not themselves recyclable. This ultimately will not reduce the demand for new plastic. The main misconception is that we only have two choices, recycle or discard in landfills, and this obscures other options such as reducing use, buying in bulk and using refillable containers.

Bioplastics

• Bioplastics are made with natural products like vegetable oils and cornstarch so that they degrade much quicker. But bioplastics have problems of their own. There is no labeling to distinguish bioplastics from other types, so people may not know which kind they are buying. This may contaminate the recycling process when bioplastics are mixed together with petroleum-based plastics.