The Broken Recycling System
By 
Brett Christophers has an excellent essay at the London Review of Books, going over a number of new books writing about waste and recycling and making the point that the recycling system in hopelessly broken because we let corporations control too much of their own behavior and instead try to turn this production problem into a consumption problem that can be blamed on individual people and their behavior. A couple of excerpts:
Franklin-Wallis emphasises that for all the justifiable criticisms of recycling, it is mostly a good thing. Recycling an aluminium can uses about 90 per cent less energy and emits about 90 per cent less carbon dioxide than making a can from scratch. Recycling a tonne of steel requires a quarter of the energy of producing it new and generates less than a fifth of the air pollution. These are significant figures. Steel is the world’s most recycled material: nearly 90 per cent of it is cycled back into production. Paper and cardboard aren’t far behind: in Britain, about 80 per cent is recycled.
The problem comes with materials that are more difficult or less advantageous to recycle. In some sectors, much less recycling takes place than we like to think. Consumer electronics is one, with a global rate of effective recycling of around 20 per cent. Clothing and food also produce colossal amounts of waste. Franklin-Wallis reserves particular scorn for the fashion industry, which, he writes, ‘is the business of waste; its very existence [depends on] obsolescence.’ The figures are jaw-dropping. Around a quarter of all clothing manufactured is never sold, and the rates of return within the refund window can be as high as 50 per cent. Most of this unwanted stock is buried or burned, as, eventually, are most of the clothes that consumers do buy and wear, but which, especially in the rich world, they discard after an increasingly short period.
As for food, around a trillion dollars’ worth is discarded each year, representing as much as a third of worldwide production. The bulk of the throwing-away occurs at the point of consumption, in households: the average British household spends about £700 each year on food it doesn’t eat. What happens to the food we throw away varies from country to country. In Britain, most of it is composted or processed to produce biogas, which can be burned to generate electricity or used as a transport fuel. In America, by contrast, as recently as 2018, four-fifths of discarded food was burned or buried.
Despite all the issues with electronics, food and clothing, however, the biggest problem is plastic, the global production of which has increased two hundredfold since 1950, reaching more than 400 million tonnes by 2022. Less than 10 per cent of used plastics are recycled to produce new plastics. There are a number of reasons for this. For one thing, many plastics can’t be recycled. And there has been a growing reluctance to recycle the ones that can, because doing so takes a heavy environmental toll: China’s recycling of imported used plastics into new plastics, Clapp writes, ‘required vast inputs of energy and water and released innumerable microplastics and toxins into local ecosystems’. What’s more, there is seldom a business case for recycling plastics. Producing new plastics is usually cheaper. Indeed, it was in the late 2010s, after China had built sufficient domestic manufacturing capacity to meet its own prodigious need for plastics, that it cut off the supply of used materials from overseas.
Some plastics are reused in other ways. But as Clapp notes, these processes are often ‘energy-intensive and toxins-unleashing’ – the burning of plastics as ‘fuel’ in Indonesia’s tofu and cracker factories is an example. Even in the relatively few cases where plastics can be reused or recycled, the trick can only be repeated two or three times (unlike steel). Sooner or later (usually sooner), all plastics are burned, buried or dumped. And what distinguishes plastic from other forms of waste is that the problem does not then go away. Try as we might to make it disappear through incineration or landfill, we can’t. Plastic survives, finally ‘disintegrating into an infinite number of unfathomably tiny pieces and contaminants’.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, Franklin-Wallis writes, as the environmental consequences of plastics disposal became clearer, the plastic-packaging industry deployed a series of tactics in a bid to continue doing business as usual. One was to shift the blame onto consumers: waste became ‘litter’. ‘People, not containers, are responsible’ for ecological damage, the US National Soft Drink Association claimed in 1967. Later, the industry put a lot of effort into promoting recycling, despite knowing that in practice it couldn’t be made to work.
This story calls to mind the behaviour of Big Oil and fossil fuels. For ‘litterbugs’, think individual ‘carbon footprints’; for recycling, think carbon capture and storage. Just as Big Oil has repeatedly failed to deliver on pledges to begin decarbonising, so too the promises of plastics companies have been hollow. In the early 1990s, for example, Coca-Cola announced its intention to make its bottles from 25 per cent recycled plastic, only to quietly ditch the target four years later, after political and consumer pressure had eased. This is not to suggest that consumers aren’t a big part of the problem. In the rich world, our wastefulness is horrific. But, as with climate change, the focus on consumers deflects scrutiny that should be directed towards industry. Not only do companies help establish false representations of consumer wastefulness, they are themselves waste creators on a gigantic scale, and often terrible managers of waste.
There’s a critique of the so-called Abundance Agenda as well:
Abundance: How We Build a Better Future by the liberal American commentators Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson focuses on governance and planning, particularly in the US and particularly in its cities.* As Klein and Thompson see it, overzealous planning in such cities as New York in recent decades has created scarcity – and endless fights over how to distribute scarce resources – where it needn’t exist. Their chief examples are housing and infrastructure more generally. They see the manufactured scarcity of such resources, and its consequences in runaway house prices and rents, as the chief blight on America’s cities. Abundance, simply building and making more, is their solution. ‘We want more homes and more energy, more cures and more construction,’ they write.
But here’s the thing: the US, of all places, doesn’t need more. It certainly doesn’t need more energy. At 77 MWh, energy use per capita in the US in 2024 was more than double what it was in Britain and France. The US also doesn’t need to build housing more quickly – even, arguably, in cities such as New York, where housing costs have climbed most rapidly in the past two decades. For all the seeming consensus among commentators that insufficient construction and hence a growing housing shortage largely explains the inflation of prices and rent, in 2020 New York City actually had more housing units per head of population (0.411) than it did twenty years earlier (0.400). It also had more housing units per household (1.07 v. 1.06 in 2000).
Tackling the world’s waste problem seems unlikely to align with the pursuit of abundance. In 2018, the US construction sector generated 600 million tonnes of construction and demolition waste: everything from concrete and masonry to gypsum, glass, plastics, metals and assorted hazardous matter. This doesn’t include the tremendous amount of waste produced in the process of mining the sand, gravel, gypsum, clay, bauxite, copper, bitumen, quartz and iron ore that constitute the foundations of all modern buildings. Not to mention the vast CO2 emissions associated with the manufacturing of steel and cement.
The basic point is this–if you want to control waste, you have to force corporations to do it, just like you have to force corporations to do everything you want them to. The idea of corporate self-regulation or Corporate Social Responsibility is just outright absurd.
Maybe the best that can be hoped for is that stuff be produced in the least wasteful way possible. Coca-Cola could be forced to manufacture bottles from recyclable or recycled plastic. Britain’s water companies could be forced to reduce and ultimately stop sewage spills. Why hasn’t this happened already? A key reason is the influence of another baleful idea which, like abundance, liberals have rallied behind: corporate social responsibility. CSR holds that firms have obligations beyond generating profit, to social and environmental well-being, for example. From the 1980s, firms started to set sustainability goals and to make much of their ethical supply chains. Policymakers were all too glad to relax in the belief that companies were effectively regulating and reducing their social and environmental impact. Coca-Cola’s setting of packaging content targets was a prototypical example.
Forty years later, it is abundantly clear that CSR was and is a myth. Even if firms claim to recognise their social and environmental responsibilities, profitability always trumps them when they clash, just as Coca-Cola demonstrated when it dropped its own targets. Whenever companies have been permitted to continue to produce excessive waste and to pollute – which is to say, whenever they have not been required to bear the full costs of doing so – that is invariably what they have done.
Of course. Corporations exist for profit. They won’t do a single thing other than that. Law is the only answer. But even Democrats, going back to the Carter mania for deregulation, moving through Bill Clinton and very strongly in the hearts of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is the idea that corporations are fundamentally good and we need to help them do what they want instead of what we need. So we aren’t going to do the first thing about any of this until we kill liberal self-delusion, even before we get to actually controlling the corporations.