Talk of environmental issues can incite eye-rolling among many a business leader. Particularly in industries such as manufacturing and mining, government measures to protect the environment and promote sustainability often mean additional regulations, paperwork, and overhead that corporations may find burdensome.
So it’s no wonder that Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato Sí (On Care for Our Common Home) received a cool reception — even though its fundamental principle of stewardship for the earth traces to the creation story in Genesis.
Among points in his encyclical, Francis decried our "throwaway society" and the failure of industries to develop a "circular model of production" capable of "limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them" (22).
LATHER, RINSE, REPEAT
Reusing and recycling is actually something U.S. and Canadian companies tend to do rather well. Even when it’s not particularly cost-effective, recycling is a highly visible way businesses can tout their concerns for the environment and for their local communities, particularly during Earth Day observances each April. But recycling is a work in progress.
Comparing industrial recycling with consumer recycling is like comparing apples to oranges. Industrial practices vary widely with the raw materials and resources used in manufacturing and processing. Households do not ordinarily deal with wastewater, mine tailings, or coal combustion residuals. But although industrial waste streams are complicated to measure, track, and evaluate, the measurables that are possible do show that industries have made great strides in recycling many forms of waste in recent years.
For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports that waste managed by manufacturing sectors increased by 35 percent between 2011 and 2020, driven largely by increased recycling; and 95 percent of the sectors’ production-related waste was managed through treatment, energy recovery, and recycling, with only 5 percent released into the environment.
JUST ONE WORD: PLASTICS
What industry sectors have in common with municipalities and households is the challenge of plastics. The recycling of plastics has been promoted for years and is often a component of community curbside recycling programs. But core problems remain: it’s neither popular nor cost-effective, and — according to no less an authority than the folks at Greenpeace USA — it doesn’t work.
"The plastics and products industries have been promoting plastic recycling as the solution to plastic waste since the early 1990s," Greenpeace states in its 2022 report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again. "Some 30 years later, the vast majority of U.S. plastic waste is still not recyclable."
A big part of the problem is diversity. Plastic consumer materials are made with various grades of resins, each identified by an initialism — such as PET, HDPE, PVC, and LDPE — and a corresponding numeral from 1 to 7 within the familiar "recycling triangle" symbol. But Greenpeace says these symbols are misleading, and that the only genuinely recyclable plastics are polyethylene terephthalate (PET), or #1 plastics, commonly used in water and soft-drink bottles, and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), or #2 plastics, used for milk jugs and shampoo bottles.
The rest is a recycling nightmare. As a whole, Greenpeace says, plastic recycling fails for five reasons: plastics are difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort, environmentally harmful to reprocess, often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and not economical to recycle.
Yet there’s another issue: whereas glass and metals are infinitely recyclable, and even paper and cardboard can be recycled several times, plastics quickly degrade in quality during recycling. The overseas market for plastic waste has decreased dramatically in recent years as well. So, acceptance at a materials recovery facility does not mean items will be recycled: Greenpeace notes that the city of Knoxville, TN, publicly states they accept #3 through #7 plastics at its recycling facility but promptly disposes of them because "there is no end-market buyer."
INDUSTRY MAINTAINS HOPE
Greenpeace blames the plastics industry. It calls for new standards for what "recyclable" means and for the phasing out of single-use plastics in favor of standardized reusable packaging, with a goal of ending "the age of plastics."
But business has its own solutions. The Plastics Industry Association disputes the Greenpeace report as "false narratives," pointing to massive investments in new technologies to make products more recyclable. It also notes the value of plastic packaging in reducing food waste and building a "reliable, sustainable food supply chain."
Science Daily published a report in March 2023 about a Swedish study that suggested a sustainable plastics economy is feasible. Plastics are produced mainly from crude oil, so their "energy-intensive" production as well as the incineration of plastic waste releases large quantities of environmentally unhealthy carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But a key requirement for a circular economy of plastics returns to the old issue: at least 74 percent of plastics would need to be recycled in order to achieve comprehensive sustainability with respect to planetary resources. (By comparison, in 2021, less than 6 percent of plastic waste in the U.S. was recycled.)
The researchers also stated that plastic products must be better aligned with the circular economy of the future, and thus manufacturers should work more closely with recyclers — implying a shared responsibility for the common good.
Pope Francis rightly called for "circular means of production" in Laudato Sí. That’s precisely what the plastics industry is striving for amid all the present challenges. But finding solutions is a complex task, and it requires sustainable effort.