Is Recycling a Scam? Yes and No. Recycling is usually the best thing you can do with plastic waste. Every ton of plastic you recycle is a ton of new plastic you don’t have to produce from oil. The problem is: it hardly happens. Why? Because the economics don’t work. Plastic is so cheap to manufacture that it’s often cheaper to make new plastic than to collect, sort, clean, and recycle existing plastic. There are two kinds of plastic recycling: mechanical and chemical. Mechanical recycling essentially involves remelting plastic. However, plastic degrades over time, and contaminants build up, meaning you can only recycle it a limited number of times. Even this relatively simple method is bad business—it’s only marginally profitable when oil prices are high. Chemical recycling, on the other hand, uses solvents to break the plastic down to its building blocks, removing contaminants and circumventing degradation problems. This allows the plastic to be recycled infinitely without any loss in quality. However, it is far more expensive than mechanical recycling, so once again, the economics don’t add up. This is why today only 9-13% of plastic is recycled. Unsurprisingly, most of this is PET—a more valuable type of plastic. This stands in stark contrast to many metals. Mining and refining metals require a lot of energy, which acts as a ‘natural tax’ on producing new metals. This makes recycling metals financially viable, which is why it happens much more frequently. Unless the fundamental economics change, plastic recycling rates will remain low in the future.