PET peeve
Last week, a group of chemists detailed a novel class of potentially recyclable polymers that may be constructed into a variety of plastic-like materials, but can be broken down after use to be reformed into new products. Although only a preliminary finding, the research highlights the ongoing efforts from scientists around the world to find a solution to single-use plastics like PET and HDPE — with humans still producing ~400 million tons of plastic waste every year.
Other recent efforts have included plastic-eating bacteria and fungi, but nothing yet has proved scalable enough to temper our global plastic addiction.
Breaking the cycle
After plastic broke into the mainstream in the 1950s, it took another 3 decades for curbside recycling to be introduced in the US.
Since then, despite the boom in recycling processing facilities that followed — with the amount of plastic recycled domestically skyrocketing from 20,000 tons in 1980 to 3 million tons nearly 4 decades later — the rise of recycling hasn’t been enough.
Data from the EPA reveals that in 2018 some 36 million tons of plastic were produced in the US, of which only 8.7% was recycled. Since plastics take anywhere from 20-500 years to degrade, and a total ~4.9 billion tons of the material over all time is estimated to have been discarded after one use, reprocessing all this rubbish using current methods would take centuries.
