the plastic industry has long promoted recycling, despite the fact that is well aware that it has been a failure. Globally, only 9 percent of plastic waste actually it is recycled. In the United States, the rate is now 5 percent. Most used plastics are landfilled, incinerated, or end up drifting in the environment.
Now an alarming new study found that even when plastic makes it to a recycling center, it can still end up splintering into smaller pieces that pollute the air and water. This pilot study focused on a single new facility where plastics are sorted, crushed, and melted into pellets. Along the way, the plastic is washed multiple times, releasing microplastic particles (fragments smaller than 5 millimeters) into the plant’s wastewater.
Because there were multiple washes, the researchers were able to sample the water at four separate points along the production line. (They are not revealing the identity of the operator of the facility, which cooperated with his project.) This plant was actually in the process of installing filters that could trap particles larger than 50 microns (a micron is a millionth of a meter), so the team was able to calculate the concentrations of microplastics in the filtered discharge water. and untreated, basically a before and after snapshot of the effectiveness of the filtration.
Its microplastic count was astronomical. Even filtering, they calculate that the total discharge from the different washes could produce up to 75,000 million particles per cubic meter of residual water. Depending on the recycling facility, that liquid would ultimately be discharged into city water systems or into the environment. In other words, recyclers trying to solve the plastics crisis may, in fact, be accidentally exacerbating the microplastics crisis, which is covering each corner of he atmosphere with synthetic particles.
“It seems a bit overdue, almost, that we recycle plastics to protect the environment, and then end up adding to a different and potentially more harmful problem,” says plastics scientist Erina Brown, who led the research while at the University of Strathclyde.
“It raises some very serious concerns,” agrees Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator for the US Environmental Protection Agency, who was not involved in the paper. “And I also think this points to the fact that plastics are fundamentally not sustainable.”
The Association of Plastic Recyclers, an international group representing the industry, did not respond to a request for comment.
The good news is that filtration makes all the difference: without it, the researchers calculated that this single recycling facility could emit up to 6.5 million pounds of microplastic a year. The leak brought it down to an estimated 3 million pounds. “So it definitely had a big impact when they installed the filtration,” Brown says. “We found a particularly high removal efficiency for particles larger than 40 microns.”
But one critical caveat is that the team only tested microplastics down to 1.6 microns. Plastic particles can become much smaller, such as elder brotherplastics that are small enough to enter individual cells—and they grow a lot more numerous as they do. So this is probably a significant underestimate. And these researchers were finding a batch of particularly small particles. At two of the sampling points, approximately 95% of the microplastics were less than 10 microns and 85% were less than 5 microns. “I was completely shocked at how small most of them were,” says Brown. “But we could easily have found many smaller than that.”
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