The history of plastic recycling began well before the first piece of plastic was repurposed. To truly understand the history of plastic recycling, we must start at the rise of the industrial revolution in the 18th century, which completely altered the course of human history. The standard of living increased, there was a rapid evolution in medicine and job opportunities skyrocketed for people in rural areas. While the industrial revolution led to countless benefits, it also resulted in the generation of waste: lots of it.
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The population boom associated with this new chapter in history has created so much trash, we literally didn’t know what to do with it. In the beginning, we allowed it to swell in landfills, buried it underground, burned it or just dumped it into the ocean. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way since then.
Although we still have work to do, innovations in recycling have helped us close the recycling loop more and more through the decades since. One of the biggest game-changers was the introduction of plastic recycling. Overall, it has had one of the biggest, most profound effects on our waste system.
AAA Polymer is proud to be a part of the history of plastic recycling. We are even more proud of the leadership role we've taken to make plastic recycling feasible for several warehouses and distribution centers throughout the area. Let's take a look at the history of plastic recycling to see how far we've come and how bright the future is for the industry.
In 1907, the Belgian-born American chemist Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the world’s first fully synthetic plastic. He was the first individual who coined the term, and it’s thanks to him thay plastic is a part of our world today. Its high resistance to electricity and insulating properties made it popular in the automotive industry, but it was also used in other products such as frying pans and jewelry.
Fast forward to 1950, and we come across the Canadian inventor Harry Wasylyk. Together with Larry Hansen, they were able to create a waterproof, stretchy plastic known as polyethylene. Harry made his first plastic trash bags in his kitchen and supplied them to Winnipeg General Hospital to use as liners for garbage cans. Following his invention, plastic started to gain more momentum.
In 1959, Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin made the prototype for what would inevitably become the plastic bag we are accustomed to seeing today. They were developed as an alternative to the widespread use of paper bags, which were losing popularity at the time due to their contribution to deforestation. Little did he know, he was about to open a whole new bag of worms.
In the 1960s, people began to become aware of the potential risks involved with the use of plastic. America was in the middle a radical paradigm shift sweeping the country and changing all aspects of everyday life. It included a change in opinion of the Vietnam War, civil rights and environmental concerns.
The types of plastic bags as we know them today were made by the Swedish company Cellopast in 1965, who were able to mainstream their product globally. Even with resistance from environmental activists, plastic bags were starting to become the new norm. As the 1960s came to an end and public opinion continued to shift, something needed to be done to quench the distaste for plastic that was starting to bubble to the surface.
The first plastic waste recycling mill was created in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania in 1972, becoming the blueprint for all future recycling plants. Over time, government programs and environmental activists started educating people about the habits of recycling and forced manufacturers to produce plastic that was easier to recycle. These efforts paid off with the adoption of HDPE and PETE plastic in the 1980s, which were designed with recycling in mind.
This was around the same time major cities across America were starting to create recycling programs of their own. In 1984, an astonishing 100 million pounds of plastic was gathered nationwide, a milestone in the history of plastic recycling.
In 1988, the closed-loop triangular symbol to identify plastic resin in packaging was adopted and quickly became a popular symbol for recycling. As the 20th century started to wind down, more efforts around the country from manufacturers and consumers alike helped recycling become a central part of American culture.
The 21st century has continued the trend of the 1990s, with recycling becoming an ever more important factor in how Americans operate and dispose of their waste. Today, a growing number of warehouses and distribution centers are cashing in on the amazing financial and environmental benefits of recycling.
Because warehouses and distribution centers use massive amounts of recyclable stretch films and stretch wraps, they are recognizing the tremendous savings by removing these plastic scraps from their waste flow. Stretch film recycling programs are saving businesses money by reducing the hauling of the trash to the disposal site and reducing the tipping fee charged at the disposal site. At the same time, several new plastic recycling and recovery initiatives are popping up every day to give used plastics a new life.
At AAA Polymer, we are a leading stretch film and stretch wrap recycler. We work closely with warehouses, distribution centers, and similar businesses to create real savings and make a real environmental difference.
Looking to learn more about plastic stretch film recycling? Don't hesitate to reach out to the team at AAA Polymer today.
Recycling as we know it today has only been around for about 40 years. Plastic recycling got started even later. It has never worked very well. A look at plastic recycling history shows that it never even had a chance to work.
Part of the reason is that the plastics and fossil fuels industries pushed plastic recycling to prevent unfavorable laws and regulation. But another part, one that gets less press, is an innovation that swept the nation in the 1960s, with disastrous consequences.
Let’s examine recycling problems, and especially plastic recycling problems and see if there are any viable ways forward.
Municipal trash collection started in this country in the late 19th century. At first, the cities separated out anything they could sell, but by the 1920s, it seemed more trouble than it was worth.
I grew up in the 1950s. Every night after supper, my mother wrapped garbage in newspapers. I carried it outside to the garbage can. We also had a separate trash can for cans, jars, broken stuff, and the like—almost anything that couldn’t rot, but not paper. Trucks from two different companies emptied the cans once a week. I burned wastepaper in a backyard incinerator.
The rest of the country handled waste much the same way.
In 1957, however, Los Angeles banned backyard incineration. Los Angeles families had to keep paper separate and hire a third company to haul it off. Sam Yorty became mayor by promising to end the necessity of separating waste at all. Los Angeles had plenty of canyons that seemed ill suited for any useful purpose. So Yorty turned them into trash dumping sites.
It turned out to be an especially costly convenience. Most trash (apart from garbage) had wound up in dumps for decades. Adding garbage to the mix made the dumps unsanitary. Slowly, the old dumps evolved into today’s sanitary landfills. If we had kept separate collections for garbage and trash, extracting recyclables would have been much easier.
Meanwhile, the postwar boom had created an unprecedented economic problem. Factories churned out more goods than American consumers could buy. And we had no place to export it, since Europe was still digging out from the devastation of the war.
Waste and planned obsolescence saved us from that problem. And overwhelmed our landfills.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) makes a convenient milestone in the public’s interest in environmental issues.
Private recycling programs started in its wake. The relatively few people who wanted to participate carried materials to the centers—if there were any available. There, they sorted everything into separate bins: aluminum cans, “tin” cans, different colored glass, newspaper, office paper.
In 1960, perhaps 6% of waste got recycled. The rest went to landfills. Or wound up as litter. Lady Bird Johnson made highway beautification her special project as First Lady. In part, it called attention to the litter. Oregon passed the nation’s first bottle bill to combat litter, in 1971.
Woodbury, New Jersey offered the first curbside recycling program in the US in 1980. It must have been reasonably successful. Since Yorty’s innovation had soon gone nationwide, people were out of the habit of separating anything. About 10% of America’s waste was recycled in that year.
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Most recycling programs used single-stream recycling. That is, participants had to put recyclables and other trash in two separate containers. But the recycling container comingled paper, metal, and glass.
Recycling centers sorted everything, baled it, and sold it to companies that would turn it into raw materials for making something else.
If I recall correctly, it didn’t become possible to recycle slick magazine paper until much later. The coated paper used for cash register receipts is still not recyclable. It winds up in bales of mixed paper with little resale value. Plastic recycling history started even later.
By now, more than 35% of our trash gets recycled. That’s in part because plastic has been added to the mix. Recycling participation hasn’t increased for years.
In the years after World War II, manufacturers began to make more and more plastic products. And not just consumer products. Plastic packaging became common, too.
By the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, the proliferation of plastic trash began to alarm municipal waste management agencies.
Suffolk County, New York, on Long Island, became the first municipality to ban plastic bags in 1988. It marked the opening of a war against the plastics industry by municipal waste management and environmentalists. The plastic industry sued, and years later, the county repealed the law.
Other city governments began to explore ways to restrict plastic. The plastics industry managed to persuade about a dozen states to restrict the ability of local governments to do so. It has used lobbying efforts and threats of lawsuits to protect its interests.
Other industries have also used such tactics, but the plastics industry devised a completely different defense mechanism. It offered plastic recycling as an alternative waste management strategy.
A TV ad in 1990 showed a plastic bottle bouncing from a garbage truck. The voiceover said that the bottle wasn’t trash. Even though it was empty, it had a lot of potential. The ad touted the beginning of a comprehensive plastic recycling program. The plastics industry itself, along with the oil and gas industry, paid for this and many similar ads. They wanted to make the American public feel good about plastic packaging.
Does that empty bottle have value? Yes. Recyclers can wash such bottles, chop them up, and sell the flake. It can be used to make new bottles or polyester.
But the ad implied that plastic waste in general had value. Even though the industries knew better. Even though they didn’t even want plastic recycling to work. After all, recycling that bottle to make polyester means that much less oil to sell to make new plastic for the same purpose.
Recently uncovered documents show that the plastics industry knew plastic recycling wasn’t economically viable as early as the 1970s. But if it could make plastic recycling seem like a better alternative to banning plastic, it could continue to churn out more plastic packaging. And it began to pressure municipalities into accepting more kinds of plastic for recycling.
China saw opportunity in becoming the world’s recycler. It eagerly bought all kinds of materials for recycling. That is, it did until it realized that it had to send an inordinate amount of it to its own landfills. After years of warnings, China announced a ban on importing recycling beginning in 2018.
The Society of the Plastics Industry (since renamed the Plastics Industry Association) introduced a coding system for plastics in 1988. One reason for doing so was to facilitate recycling of post-consumer plastic.
The codes used the numbers 1-7:
Those codes are about the only way consumers can distinguish a PET water bottle from a PP shampoo bottle, but they confused more than educated people. For one thing, the industry chose to enclose the numbers within the already familiar recycling triangle. They quickly became known as plastic recycling numbers and implied that everything with a code was recyclable.
Municipal recycling programs long ago abandoned plastic recycling numbers in their definitions of what could and could not go out to the curb. And since 2013, the codes have appeared within solid triangles and not the chasing triangles of the recycling symbol. Much of the public probably hasn’t noticed.
Typically, recycling centers sort plastic into PET, HDPE (which are valuable), and everything else. There is no market for the bales of mixed plastic.
Even within any one resin identification code, there are subcategories that have implications for plastic recycling.
PET bottles are made by blowing liquid plastic into a molding machine. In this form, PET has a high enough molecular weight to be used for making new bottles. It can also make polyester yarn.
PET for the kind of clamshell packaging that might contain a piece of cheesecake or a salad is made by heating a thin sheet of it and pressing it into a mold. In this form, called thermoform, it has a low molecular weight. It can’t be used to make new bottles, but it can become polyester.
In other words, recycled thermoforms have fewer uses. I don’t know if recycling centers can separate them from PET bottles, but even if they can, there is no reliable market for them.
Recycled plastic bags (no. 4) can become composite lumber, but don’t put them out at the curb. They wreak havoc on sorting equipment. Return them to labeled plastic recycling containers at a grocery store.
I few years ago, I posted about three different machines for compressing Styrofoam™ for recycling. With so many technological options for handing it, post-consumer Styrofoam must have value. Unfortunately, can never make it through any sorting system intact. It breaks into little pieces and contaminates bales of everything else. You might be able to find a drop-off center that accepts it. And it probably accepts nothing else.
What about mixed plastic?
Except for PVC, it can all be recycled by pyrolysis. That process reduces plastic to something resembling crude oil. Until pyrolysis becomes more widespread, count mixed plastic as trash, not recyclable.
But a bigger problem is that now, we rely on municipalities to bear the costs of collecting and sorting recyclables. Extended producer responsibility would give that responsibility to manufacturers. If manufacturers had to take back post-consumer wastes, they would figure out ways to recycle them. That’s what happens under Europe’s extended producer responsibility laws.
The history of plastic resin identification codes in recycling / Jennie Romer, Green Biz. May 28, 2021
Inside the long war to protect plastic / Tik Root, The Center for Public Integrity. May 16, 2019
The myth about recycling plastic? It works / Tiffany Duong, Eco Watch. September 20, 2020 When did Americans start recycling? / Sheila Mulrooney Eldred, History.com. April 14, 2020
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