By: Mouctar Diallo
Edited by: James Wen
There’s something quietly humiliating about those shape sorting games toddlers play. Not the toy itself, the confidence. They push shapes into the wrong slots, convinced that pressing harder will make the triangle fit into the square shaped hole. We call it cute and laugh it off, yet when adults throw water bottles in compost bins, no one looks twice—and no one has ever called me cute for it.
The infamous statistic that states that only about 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled shows that recycling is not the robust solution people believe it is. Annual plastic waste more than doubled from 2000 to 2019, but recycling infrastructure and policies lag behind with about 79% of plastic ending up in landfills and scattered across the natural environment.
Many people like to believe companies deliberately throw trash because it’s cheaper, and while that may be the case, the truth is there are many challenges and barriers ahead of efficient recycling, and one of the sturdiest ones is contamination. Both from leftover food and organic waste, plastics are often contaminated with residue, labels, or other non plastic materials that make it difficult to process and isolate recyclable materials. To put the problem this poses into perspective, ultimately 15% of global waste is collected for recycling, but a whopping 40% of that 15 is discarded due to contamination.
Economic factors are also a profound reason as to why so little plastic gets recycled. To make new, unused “virgin” plastic from oil costs less than to recycle and process used plastic. On top of this, in many regions, recycling operators are simply not competitive, whether it be due to international competition, or domestic monopolies, the fact of the matter is recycling is expensive, and companies are stingy. More times than not this inconsistency creates a market failure, as the marginal social benefit of recycling exceeds the marginal private benefit to recycling firms. Despite this, it seems cost isn’t even the sole factor, as businesses in the market for plastic also prefer virgin plastic because they are more consistent and predictable.
With more research, it becomes increasingly concerning how the government has fooled us into thinking this practice is sustainable. Throughout my life, I have seen formidable duos, Batman and Robin, Spongebob and Patrick, yet one I never thought I’d mention was the government and plastic producers. In their prime, this duo could easily spend billions of dollars together to cultivate an illusion of recycling success. One where all the blame would fall on the consumer. This ideology was optimistic to say the most, and wrong to say the least, pushing the narrative that if, and only if citizens cleaned and sorted their waste properly, nearly all plastic could be recovered, and reused.
In one striking example in 1974, a leaked private shareholder meeting of the SPI (Society of Plastics Industries) privately admitted that plastic recycling is “uneconomical” and not a “permanent solution”, yet shortly after, the industry picked things up a notch, ramping up pro-recycling ads in the 1980s when faced with plastic bans. This gap between internal reality and public messaging allowed for such widescale misinformation to happen, and the collaboration between both recycling companies and governments all over the world was consistent in fostering a global recycling myth, and effective in manipulating consumers into thinking they are the problem.
The media did its part, optimism did the rest, and together they brought a comforting lie: that recycling would save us. But blindly running away from the problem won’t solve it, and the reality is, no amount of sorting or optimism can fix a system that was never designed to succeed in the first place. Change can’t start in our kitchens, or blue bins, it has to start where the problem did—at the top of the system.
Image Citation: Freepik. (2022). High angle kid playing with wooden toy [Photograph]. Freepik.com. https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/high-angle-kid-playing-with-wooden-toy_24747666.htm
References:
Baker, J. (2025, November 6). How the plastics industry shifted responsibility for recycling onto you, the consumer. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-plastics-industry-shifted-responsibility-recycling.html#google_vignette
Noor, D. (2024, February 15). “They lied”: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/recycling-plastics-producers-report#:~:text=Share
OECD. (2022, February 22). Global Plastics Outlook: Economic Drivers, Environmental Impacts and Policy Options. OECD Publishing eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1787/de747aef-en
OECD. (2022, February 22). Plastic pollution is growing relentlessly as waste management and recycling fall short, says OECD. OECD. https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2022/02/plastic-pollution-is-growing-relentlessly-as-waste-management-and-recycling-fall-short.html#:~:text=,from%20clothing%20and%20textiles