More Plastic Trash Produced In 2021 Than Ever Before: Barely 2% Of It Is Recycled [View all]

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When Exxon Mobil announced a record $56 billion annual profits last week, it noted that the company had established “one of the largest advanced recycling facilities in North America, capable of processing more than 80 million pounds of plastic waste per year.” That seems like a lot of recycling muscle, except when you consider another figure. The company produced an estimated 6 million metric tons, or 13.2 billion pounds, of polymers used to make plastic in 2021 alone. That is an estimate from a report published by the Minderoo Foundation, set up by the Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest. Minderoo tracks plastic waste and campaigns against it.

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Plastics production continued to grow, according to industry data. So did plastic trash: 139 million metric tons in 2021, more than ever before. That’s a lot, especially considering that plastic entered our everyday lives after World War II. They’re so pervasive that when one reporter tried to spend a day living without plastic, it yielded this delightfully absurd essay.

Almost all of that 139 million metric tons of plastic is made from “virgin” petroleum products that have never been used or processed before. Barely 2 percent gets recycled, Minderoo researchers estimated.

It clogs streams. It chokes turtles. It gets caught on a bare branch and blows in the breeze. It stews in landfills. But it is also a climate pollutant. From the extraction of fossil fuels to make polymers to the transport and disposal of the waste, single-use plastics produced 450 million metric tons of planet-warming greenhouse gases in 2021 alone, according to estimates by Minderoo, or just below the annual emissions of Britain.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/climate/plastic-waste-recycling.html