The myth of plastic recycling

Of the more than 50 million tons of discarded plastic in America in 2021, only about 5% of it is recycled. That works out to about 300 pounds of plastic per person ending up in landfills and waterways.

With some items taking more than half of a millennium to break down, plastic pollution is here to stay.

"Plastic is not decomposing in this landfill anytime soon," said Bianca Howard of the Wake County Environmental Services Department. At South Wake and other landfills across the country, plastic makes up nearly 20% of the waste.

The EPA has promoted recycling as a way to reduce carbon emissions, but its own figures show that those benefits come almost entirely from paper and metal recycling, rather than plastic.

"I think it's been a myth for a very long time and we've had the wool pulled over our eyes," Brad Liski said.

Frustration with the myth of plastic circularity inspired Liski to start a company called Tru Earth and innovate plastic-free cleaning supplies.

Tru Earth sells pre-measured laundry detergent strips in cardboard packaging to combat the estimated 700,000,000 plastic laundry detergent containers are discarded each year.

Liski says one reason more companies aren't moving away from plastic is because it's so cheap to use.

"Our FSC certified papers are extremely more expensive than getting plastic, so I can understand why there's pressure to be lower cost," Liski said. "But at the end of the day, we've got to look at the overall cost to us as a society."

Though the recycling rate is falling, plastic production is on the rise. Per capita plastic waste went from 60 pounds per year in 1980 to 218 pounds in 2018, an increase of 263%.

Production of the most common plastic, polyethylene, is on track to jump more than 40 percent by 2028 in the U.S., according to research firm S&P Global Platts.