Re: “Advanced recycling could be America’s next tech boom”

Where to begin?

The one person quoted in (and throughout) the piece is the president of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an aggressive lobbying organization bankrolled by the petrochemical industry. These are the people who have prevented the New York State Legislature from passing the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act for the past three years. 

Mr. ACC is trying to sell readers on a techno-fix for our plastic pollution problem. But so-called “advanced recycling,” also called chemical recycling, is neither new nor advanced. It’s been around for decades, and it’s been a publicly funded failure. I know because a couple of years ago, I edited an in-depth report that examined 11 chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. Two have since folded.

Advanced recycling sounds great in theory. Now if only plastics weren’t made with toxic chemicals that are known to harm human health.... 

What’s more, all recycled plastic has even more toxic chemicals in it than plastic made from virgin resin. Many of these chemicals have been linked through multiple lines of evidence to a host of health problems: obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, infertility, autism and certain cancers, among other illnesses.

Also, all plastics recycling, including mechanical recycling, creates micro- and nanoplastics that inevitably escape into the environment. Microplastics have been found at the top of Mt. Everest and on the deep-sea floor. They’re inside every human organ. Lungs? Got ‘em. Bloodstream? Check. Gut, brain and penis? Yup. They’re even in newborn infants. 

“Advanced recycling” is just the industry’s latest marketing tactic to keep on selling more plastic. It’s smoke and mirrors, folks. We need to slash plastic production. Period.

Rebekah Creshkoff is a co-founder of Sustainable Sullivan. She edited Beyond Plastics’ 2023 report, “Chemical Recycling: A Dangerous Deception."