Rethinking plastic recycling: A comparison between North America and Europe

In this article, we identify the problem of plastic proliferation, the consequent expansion of plastic waste in our society, the inadequacies of current attempts to recycle plastic, and the urgency to address this problem in the light of the microplastic threat. It details the problems with current efforts to recycle plastic and the particularly poor recycling rates in North America (NA) when compared to certain countries in the European Union (EU). The obstacles to plastic recycling are overlapping economic, physical and regulatory problems spanning fluctuating resale market prices, residue and polymer contamination and offshore export which often circumvents the entire process. The primary differences between the EU and NA are the costs of end-of-life disposal methods with most EU citizens paying much higher prices for both landfilling and Energy from Waste (incineration) costs compared with NA. At the time of writing, some EU states are either restricted from landfilling mixed plastic waste or the cost is significantly greater than in NA ($80 to 125 USD/t vs $55 USD/t). This makes recycling a favourable option in the EU, and, in turn, has led to more industrial processing and innovation, more recycled product uptake, and the structuring of collection and sorting methods that favour cleaner polymer streams. This is a self-re-enforcing cycle and is evident by EU technologies and industries that have emerged to process "problem plastics", such as mixed plastic film wastes, co-polymer films, thermosets, Polystyrene, (PS) Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), and others. This is in contrast with NA recycling infrastructure, which has been tailored to shipping low-value mixed plastic waste abroad. Circularity is far from complete in any jurisdiction as export of plastic to developing countries is an opaque, but often used disposal method in the EU as it is in NA. Proposed restrictions on off-shore shipping and regulations requiring minimum recycled plastic content in new products will potentially increase plastic recycling by increasing both supply and demand for recycled product.