5 Gyres - Understanding Plastic Pollution Through Exploration, Education, and Action

The largest plastic bag recycling center in the world is in Indiana, called Hilex Poly.  Here's what I want to know- at $.10/a pound, bound and delivered for HDPE, are they turning a profit? That doesn't even cover delivery costs.  Has anyone looked at the company's finances to determine if this is actually a market based solution? Probably not, because you can't.  They're a private LLC held by HPC which manufactures plastic products. Hilex, at times, appears to be the PR front for the argument of industry lobby. They give no recycling rates of bags for the United States on their website, and they employ about a 1,000 people nationally. California's taxpayers spend 25 million dollars a year to collect and bury 19 billion plastic bags a year. 19 BILLION!  If the market was THAT good for recycling, venture capital would be opening plastic bag recycling plants in every area where they're consumed, yesterday. But instead, millions of dollars are spent on lobbyists to defeat bag bans.  It's simple: supply WAY exceeds demand.  Recycling is a band-aid on an ocean-sized wound.  

The industry continually talks about more recycling as a solution but the problem is, supply will always exceed demand, because consumption outpaces recycling-- this is what the lobby is protecting-- that consumers keep consuming.  Even if recycling rates go up, albeit slowly, consumption rates go up way faster--  which means the problem is getting worse, not better-- even with improved recycling.  Every year, more bags are consumed and more virgin plastic is produced.  If recycling was truly a solution, wouldn't the market for virgin plastics be declining?  Across the board?  Here's the problem with that--  You can't make a bag out of a bag.  You still need virgin content because the the polymer chains that hold a bag together are weakened by the recycling process.  You can only, downcycle, meaning--make products of less structural integrity than the one it's born from.  So simple math says this-- no matter how much you recycle, there will still be a net higher amount of plastic bags on the planet.  In the ocean.  In the river.  In the landfill.  In the sewer.  What's doubly insidious is that the industry is very well aware of this fact as well as the economics regarding their products in the waste stream. Cynically, they prop up recycling as a way of passing the buck to the taxpayer and government to deal with their waste.  This is calculated.  This is on purpose.  Millions of dollars are spent lobbying, creating misleading ads, rainbow and flower advertising, and oh, yes, in campaign contributions to policy-makers.  Wouldn't this money be better spent actually trying to fix the problem? Why is this money not going into venture capital to create bag recycling infrastructure if the market is that good? WHY!

Personally, I've sailed 15,000 miles with our team looking at plastic pollution in every ocean in or outside of the gyres. Plastic in the ocean increases in density in the gyres, but not in frequency.  It's not a lie, nor a stretch, to say plastic exists everywhere in the ocean and the ocean comprises 70% of the earth's surface-- it doesn't manifest like a trash island, but more like a giant synthetic soup of fragmented plastic-- in fact, from our research, HDPE is the second most common type of plastic in the ocean.  

Plastic is on every beach in the world.  

Perhaps the most startling thing members or our team have witnessed in our global campaign is this: plastic bags, weighted by sediment sink and cover the ocean floor in Recife, Brazil, so vastly that our ship could not set anchor.  COULD NOT SET ANCHOR! No, just plastic, plastic, plastic replacing the seafloor.  And as a citizen concerned by this madness, who has traveled the world bearing witness to the effect plastic has on our environment and global economy, I can't listen to industry tell me that this material is valuable when everywhere you look it's treated like garbage, worldwide. And why is it treated like garbage? Because it is.  Non-biodegradble garbage.