this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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I've recently been thinking a lot about the recyclability of plastic. I have several stacks of plastic drink cups from various fast food joints in my kitchen; as much as possible, I try to save up and bundle together similar types of plastic before I throw it in the recycling bin, to try to save some sorting effort. And in doing so, I noticed something.
The thing is, a lot of single-use plastics have very similar properties. PETE, HDPE, Polypropylene, solid polystyrene, they're all used to package similar or identical products. I think they're more or less interchangeable, and the choice of a given plastic for a given application has more to do with cost, availability and the preferences of the product engineer than any specific material properties of the plastic itself. There's obviously going to be some exceptions, but I think those are going to be few and far between, and a lot of them could be addressed by switching to other materials.
I think a great first step would be for regulators to encourage/force industries to standardize on one or two types of plastic at most, and eliminate plastics that aren't worth recycling, like polystyrene. That should reduce the manual labor required by a significant amount once the other plastics are eliminated from the waste stream, and make it feasible to recycle plastics locally instead of shipping them off to a third world country.
I think companies should be taxed or otherwise penalized for the plastic waste they foist on consumers, because often there's little choice involved unless you want to boycott a company entirely. If I wanted to eliminate plastic cups from my life, I'd pretty much have to stop getting fast food altogether (yes I know I should probably do that anyway, but that's beside the point). A tax on bulk purchases of plastic may end up being passed down to consumers, but the revenue could be put towards subsidizing production of more renewable materials.
I think food stamp programs could be a strong driver for change on this, as they could refuse to cover products that generate excessive waste. With enough warning, there should be enough time for companies to switch their products to be compliant with little disruption to the consumer.
Plastics are a byproduct of fossil fuel production, and it was and is inevitable (under capitalism) that the overproduction of plastic would lead to the manufactured demand for massive amounts of plastic goods. There was a major marketing push in the 1950s to sell consumers on the disposability of plastic, to create further demand by erasing their Great Depression/wartime-era habits of saving and reusing. There are many examples of successful campaigns to put the masses on cheap garbage, like corn syrup, that people would not have been drawn to spontaneously. These things work.
Fossil fuel companies are major centers of political power, with deep military-industrial ties, easily acquiring politicians and regulators, and encircling any stubborn holdouts. Something major would have to displace them to free up the kind of political oxygen needed for any serious effort to end plastic's invasive presence in our lives.
A decolonial not-for-profit military answerable to a socialist state could dislodge them, and I don't think anything less could.
Which is how it should be. The cost is being paid either way. It's either the consumer that pays, or we all pay for it.