China stopped taking our plastic. Now America is drowning in it.

Taylor Dorrell

America has long had a plastic problem. It’s an urgent question — what do we do with the 40 million tons of plastic waste we produce annually? One year of plastic waste is roughly enough to smother the entirety of Manhattan a meter deep, and it has to go somewhere. For years, the answer was simple: Make a lot of it, dump most of it in the landfill, and make the rest of it someone else’s problem — the US regularly exported 7 million tons a year to China alone. Some of it was melted into lesser plastic; the rest was incinerated or buried.

But then, in 2018, China cut off plastic imports.

Now, America is coming to terms with a hard truth: Plastic was never designed to be recycled and there’s no profitable way to recycle 91% of it. The environmental impacts have been disastrous. About 430 million tons of plastic are produced globally every year, accounting for 14% of global oil demand. The refinement of plastic alone emits up to 235 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. Most of that plastic breaks down into microplastics that make their way into the air, rain, and our bodies. Almost 95% of America’s water supply contains plastic fibers.

While the US, the UK, and other European countries responded to China’s ban by sending their waste to places like Thailand and Malaysia, those countries then followed China in cutting off waste imports. The message was clear: The Global South would no longer be a dumping ground for the West.

For decades, America sent its plastic waste to countries like China and Indonesia. Kartik Byma/AFP/Getty Images

America is now scrambling to find alternatives. One approach peddled by oil corporations like Chevron and Exxon has been to turn plastic into crude oil, which they say extends the life of plastic that would’ve otherwise ended up in a landfill. As these companies look to replace projected lost revenue from the phasing out of fossil fuels, they’re lobbying to blanket the country with 150 plants that specialize in pyrolysis, a form of chemical recycling that melts plastic down into crude oil to be used for fuel and petrochemicals, as well as to make lesser-quality plastics. While advocates champion these facilities for breaking down hard-to-recycle plastics that other recyclers toss aside, critics condemn them for emitting toxic particles, relying heavily on government subsidies, and acting as a greenwashed alternative to addressing the plastic problem.