For decades, Americans have been sorting their trash believing that most plastic could be recycled. But the truth is, the vast majority of all plastic produced can't be or won't be recycled. In 40 years, less than 10% of plastic has ever been recycled.
Many of the greenies pushed hard for the plastic bag ban. At the same time, commercial food waste landfill ban got very little attention, although one could argue that will save a lot more waste out of landfills, and do more to reduce carbon emissions then banning single-use plastic bans. Donating more unsold food to charities and composting food waste, is really a good idea, but it didn’t excite liberals because it wasn’t as much about social control and will be largely invisible to ordinary consumers.
If you are a New Yorker and sort your recycling at home, as city law mandates, you probably wonder, as you rinse bottles and stack junk mail and scrub yogurt containers: Does all this effort make a difference?
Well, yes, but not nearly as much as it could. New York City recycles only about a fifth of its garbage — 18 percent of trash from homes and about 25 percent from businesses — according to the city’s Department of Sanitation.
Yet seven years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg vowed to double the residential recycling rate to 30 percent by 2017.
The numbers fall far short of New York’s potential. If everything recyclable were sorted and recycled, some 68 percent of residential trash and 75 percent of commercial trash could be kept out of landfills, according to the Sanitation Department. And while city leaders have sought to improve recycling for decades, New York still lags behind major cities like Seattle and San Francisco, which recycle more than half of their waste — numbers attained over decades of policies that include stronger requirements than New York’s.
Rather than corporations restricting their own production of disposable materials and eating into their profit, American consumers would now shame each other into managing industry’s cheap waste products. It was an insidious sleight of hand that reframed America’s growing waste problem as one not of corporate excess, but of irresponsible consumer choices and individual lifestyles.
And they will seek to explain why progress on recycling remains lower than many other premier American cities, even as de Blasio and Bloomberg vowed to tackle climate change during their presidential bids. Seattle and San Francisco, for instance, boast rates that are triple New York's.
“New York City has one of the lowest big-city recycling rates in the country,” said Judith Enck, the former Region 2 administrator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, in an interview. “You would think, with that massive amount of money and carbon pollution from moving so much solid waste out of the city, that there would be like an epic campaign to reduce, recycle and compost. But oddly, there’s not.
While PP is easily among the most popular plastic packaging materials in the world, only around 1% is recycled, which means most PP is headed for the landfill. These decompose slowly over 20-30 years. This raises severe environmental issues, quite apart from toxic additives in PP such as lead and cadmium. Incineration may release dioxins and vinyl chloride, both of which are poisonous.
To determine how recyclable polypropylene is, companies have undertaken ‘life cycle’ studies that look at the plastic from the raw material production to the final stages of waste management to assess the sustainability of the product. The general consensus from these studies is that PP has considerable potential as a sustainable product.