Let's put waste into the spotlight

U.S. plastic recycling hit a high point recently — 3 billion pounds of bottles collected and recycled in 2014. One industry association noted, in releasing the data on Nov. 5, that it marked the continuation of 25 years of growth.

That is true, but it's only half the picture. If you take the same industry data and flip it upside down, you see that the amount of plastic bottles sent to landfill has stayed between 6.3 billion and 6.5 billion pounds a year since 2008.

So is it a record high in recycling? Or, because the amount of pollution and wasted resources from plastic bottles remains basically the same, is it stagnation?

I think it's both.

As the U.S. marks America Recycles Day on Nov. 15, we should also look at the waste we still generate.

In 2006, according to plastic industry data, about 2.2 billion pounds of plastic bottles were collected for recycling. That year, 7.1 billion pounds of plastic bottle material was wasted in landfills.

So there is progress. Judging from the plastics industry's reports, single-stream recycling in cities has increased the amount of containers recycled.

And with individual containers being manufactured lighter, with less plastic, the growth in pounds collected is more impressive because you have to collect more bottles to get the same pounds.

But I notice that the plastic industry recycling reports have no real discussion of the amount of plastic wasted, the amount of pollution generated, by bottles that are not recycled.

If you only focus on the positive — the 3 billion pounds collected — everything looks fine. The 31.8 percent recycling rate for plastic bottles in 2014 looks good. We're doing the best we can in reducing waste, by that line of thinking.

But we're not doing all we should be doing to reduce plastic container pollution. Not all bottles have an equal chance of being recycled.

What I mean by that is that some states have much higher recycling rates.

For example, California recycled 81 percent of PET containers and 78 percent of high density polyethylene containers covered by the state's bottle bill, in the first half of the year, according to the state's data.

About 28 percent of Americans live in states covered by bottle bills. But those states recycle about half of the containers collected in the United States.

If the entire country had a bottle bill, instead of only 10 states with 90 million people, we would be recycling a lot more of our plastic containers.

Instead of talking about recycling 3 billion pounds of plastic containers, we might be talking about 5 billion pounds, or 6 billion pounds.

There are a lot of politics involved in bottle bills, but as a system to recycle containers, they work very well. Plastics News has long advocated for bottle bills. Our stance on that is well known.

The discussion of recycling in the industry's reports should include more analysis of the waste and pollution generated by the more than 6 billion pounds of bottles not recycled, and not just the 3 billion pounds recycled.

Switching the focus to waste would help understand that there is more that can be done with container recycling, and that a 31 percent recycling rate and 3 billion pounds is not something we should settle for.

While there are many powerful interest groups lined up against bottle bills, a 50 or 60 percent bottle recycling rate would be a stronger environmental message for the industry. It would be better for society and better for the plastics industry.

Toloken is Plastics News' news editor-international. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Toloken.