Time to Makeover Plastic Recycling

Let’s start with a quiz — no Googling! Do you know what these symbols are?

If you said they are plastic recycling indicators, give yourself one point. If you can name what type of plastic each of the symbols represents, give yourself one point for each. If you know which symbols represent materials that you can recycle in your community, give yourself one point for each. Does this help?

If none of this makes sense to you, you lose 100 points! And you’re in good company!

The Codes and Points Don’t Matter

The Society of Plastics Industry created this code system in 1988, 32 years ago. How many times have you tried to read the code hoping to determine if the plastic should be recycled? If you tried, you were wasting your time since the codes are meaningless for the most part and bear little connection to the recycling process. (The codes are slightly more useful if you’re concerned about plastic safety.) If fact, barely any plastic is actually recycled, only 9% by some accounts of all the plastic created has been recycled since the 1950s.

To make matters worse, the codes are not consistent worldwide and now UK codes are starting to show up on U.S. products.

There Must be a Simpler Way

Plastic has been around for over 100 years, and environmentalists have been complaining about plastic recycling for nearly that long. The good news is that if your trash hauler or community offers single-stream recycling, then they likely will take nearly all plastics. My local hauler lists them separately further confusing the issue as if there is a difference — #1 & 2, and #3 to 7 all under 3 gallons.

I’m clearly not trying to solve the problem, but I am suggesting that the code system needs to be reworked to either provide useful information to the consumer or be done away with so that any excess effort/funds can be put towards consumer education and finding better recycling processes or alternatives. And don’t even get me started about compostable containers.

Do you recycle? What hoops do you need to jump through? Do you contribute to organizations trying to clean up the plastic mess like 4Ocean? Have you bought products made from recycled plastic such as shoes? Share your story!