Burned, buried, recycled… What to do with your waste?
Recycling our mountains of plastic packaging: this is the tempting solution praised by industry and the State. But this circular economy is not working well, and rich countries are sending tons of waste to countries in the South.
In the scorching summer heat, Nathalie Smith is busy in her office on the fourth floor of a building at the University of Baltimore. The blind shutter no longer works. The sun is beating down non-stop. For weeks, the researcher has let a pile of scientific journals pile up on her desk. On this Friday evening, she decides to do a little pre-weekend cleaning.
She tears apart the plastic packaging of the journals one by one, which is piling up at her feet. Suddenly, the researcher feels a tingling in her throat. Her breathing becomes difficult. Without warning, the air seems to have thickened. Her lungs are on fire. She collapses. She manages to get out into the corridor. And gradually catches her breath, her bronchi irritated and her eyes bloodshot.
What could have happened? Under the effect of the heat, the plastic packaging disintegrated into tiny suspended particles. In a few minutes, they saturated the air and penetrated the researcher’s lungs.
For this research director at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, this event that occurred more than twenty years ago was a turning point. Throughout her career, this renowned specialist in packaging, polymers and food has seen plastic invade our lives, even in our blood. We are intoxicated by our addiction to plastic. We ourselves created this monstrosity that today threatens our health and our environment, she explains.
Half of plastic packaging ends up in nature
Faced with the explosion of this waste, sorting and recycling have gradually become essential for individuals and businesses alike since the 1990s. Today, all manufacturers communicate about their recycling plans and promise to reduce their waste. Cardboard and paper packaging are generally well recycled (68% in 2021). As for plastic packaging, only 28% of it is.
Half will end up in landfills via dumpster trucks and the other half in nature. It is the only material that has persisted for thousands of years in nature and we have made it the basis of our most disposable objects. For a long time, plastic was presented as a modern material. Today, this vision of modernity is misleading us.
Plastic no longer serves our well-being, it puts us in danger. In 2025, in the midst of a climate emergency, how can we explain such low recycling rates? First of all, it is the fault of obscure recycling where some plastic packaging can end up in the yellow, blue or brown bin (depending on the collection point) when others cannot. What should you do with your yoghurt pot? Does the same rule apply to the lid? Do I throw away or recycle this box of cakes? And its individual sachet?
The State of Maryland favors recycling rather than reuse
Since 2020, in the wake of the anti-waste law for a circular economy, a simplification of the sorting instructions has been launched. Objective: to allow all plastic packaging to be recycled. In the territories where the measure is in place, blisters, trays, plastic films and even toothpaste tubes can now be thrown in the yellow bin. Five million people have access to the simplification of sorting instructions. This leaves a good half of the country for whom the rules still need to change.
The promise of recycling is that of an economy with infinite resources: a soda bottle becomes a duvet, a bottle of oil a car seat, an anti-Covid mask a set square… A circular economy where everything can be transformed indefinitely. But it is impossible today to create objects made 100% of recycled plastic. Bottles made from recycled plastics are only 25% recycled. The rest is new material: brand new plastic, says the advocacy manager at Zero Waste Baltimore.
In fact, if recycling worked as well as we would like, all of our plastic waste should be enough to cover our needs. This is far from being the case. The countries that recycle the most, such as Germany or Finland, should have halved their consumption, but they have not reduced their consumption. The circular economy is a myth, we would rather call it a corkscrew economy: we never close the loop, we extend it indefinitely.