Only 5% of plastic waste generated by US last year was recycled
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/23/us-plastic-waste-recycled-2021-greenpeace
Only 5% of the mountains of plastic waste generated by US households last year was recycled, according to new research by Greenpeace. Americans discarded 51m tons of wrappers, bottles and bags in 2021 - about 309lb of plastic per person - of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere in tiny toxic particles. The plastic problem is not just down to wanton consumerism or laziness in fact the situation would still be bad even if every household separated every piece of plastic and disposed of it in a dedicated recycling plant, according to Greenpeace. The report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, updates the 2020 survey of 370 recycling plants which found most plastics were not widely accepted, and even the bottles and jugs were not completely recycled or recyclable. Not much has changed, in fact the official recycling rate in the US has fallen from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. After China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2018 because it was basically garbage, too dirty to recycle, the shortfall in capacity was never while plastic use kept rising.