Burn the Lifeboats! Misdirection about Recycled Plastic Being More Toxic than Virgin Plastic

Before I dive into the details of this new twist in the dialogue about recycling, I want to be perfectly clear: There IS a method to create food-safe HDPE from recycled plastic stocks. It involves separating insecticide containers and other non-food-safe containers and creating a stream of milk and juice bottles, which were all made of food-safe virgin resin and repelletizing that resin. During this process, there are cleaning steps that eliminate contaminants that a container might have picked up after its first life. Our recycled plastics supplier is a leader in this technology. Any recycler in the US selling food-safe plastic has to go through the same rigorous process prescribed by FDA regulations to prove the efficacy of their cleaning process before they are given license to sell recycled plastic as food-safe. I'll include details about what this process entails further down.

This discussion started because we are being sent web articles referring to studies where researchers collect plastic pellets from recyclers, then when they test the plastic, they find toxins, pharmaceutics and plastic additives. We are in contact with a lot of smart sustainability advocates who keep up with the research and they are asking us fair, pointed questions about how this research applies to our products. In part, this serves as an open letter in response to those questions. First off, yes, of course, randomly collected recycled plastic pellets would have more toxins and more additives than virgin plastic. I am not debating the results of these studies, nor am I questioning their usefulness: As recyclers figure out what technologies are necessary to safely recycle plastics, it is of paramount importance to have good data about what the challenge looks like. These studies provide that data, so I'm glad they are being done.

What is concerning is the way that these studies are being interpreted, because just at the point where waste systems are gearing up to recycle much more than the 9% of plastic currently/historically recycled and finally pay off this long-promoted possibility of recycling this resource, the most virulent of the anti-plastic folks come along with a burn-the-lifeboats philosophy bent on completely eliminating plastic production altogether. One important part of convincing consumers that plastic production has to stop completely is to poison the public against plastic recycling. This concerns me because increasing plastic recycling is a key step forward in our stewardship of this planet. For ten years or more, we've been scandalized by how little recycling is happening and, now that change is actually afoot, we are working ourselves into being scandalized that recycling IS happening. (In Millennium People, the late, great JG Ballard said something about the middle class's infinite capacity for outrage, so there you are sir.)

I'll focus on a couple of studies, one study where the researchers bought recycled pellets from various plastic recyclers in the global south and one study where the researchers bought pellets made from milk bottles from a European recycler.

The lead scientist on the first study is an ocean scientist concerned about the level of chemical pollution and looking carefully at ecosystems with a question about when we will push nature to a breaking point. This is a concern we share. Buoy's entire business model is focused on putting economic incentives behind collecting plastic before it enters the ocean so that it doesn't turn into microplastics that choke the plankton and then to use the objects we make in a circular economy to prevent more disposable plastics from being manufactured.

One of the researcher's strongest recommendations in the article's conclusion is to limit/ban the worst of the plastic additives, which are having a highly deleterious effect on ocean ecosystems. Huzzah! We should ban them and I'm grateful for her leadership in shining a light on that. But to those who are waving about this study as proof that we should stop recycling now, I think comparing the recycled plastics from developing nations making no claim about food-safety to the resin from our US supplier, which is intentionally and carefully processed to be food safe, is comparing apples and oranges. (Note that the original researcher is in no way making this comparison.)

It's important to note that the extraction of the chemicals from the plastic was done by heroic means that in no way simulate normal consumer use of a plastic container. They did 6 extractions from the same pellets, two with methanol (wood alcohol), two with acetonitrile and methanol mixed and two with hexane. All six extractions were done in the presence of ultrasound to get as much as they could. They added all six extractions together and then dried the mix before analyzing it. In this residue, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals and plastic additives in that order were 361 of the 448 chemicals found in at least one sample.

This is not super-surprising. Go to a hardware store and wander the shelves. The pesticides are stored in plastic bottles, so are the weed killers, industrial degreasers, antifreeze and motor oils and on and on. When those containers get into the recycling stream, there will be pesticides and the rest either absorbed into or adsorbed onto that plastic. In comparison, there will not be pesticides in virgin plastic, as the article unsurprisingly points out. I made pharmaceuticals for much of my professional life, those would also be detectable in the plastic from the bottles we filled them in. This is why you don't use any of these kinds of plastic stock to make food-safe containers.

Turning to the study on recycled HDPE milk bottles, which is the kind of plastic we source for Buoy: They did two extractions. They put milk in the containers made from the recycled resin and found no migration of chemical compounds that reached any level of concern. Seven chemicals were detected but most tests were below the limit of quantification, meaning it was so little that they could not compare it to the standard. The most common chemical they found, diphenyl ether, is used as an odor in soaps and detergents because it happens to smell like flowers, another chemical, n-Hexyl salicylate, is a common item in sunscreen and also used as a fragrance for soaps and cosmetics.

Bottom line, in any fair read of this study, it proves that recycling this plastic for human use as a food grade container is safe and does not expose people to anything at a level that would hurt them. Toxins are only toxic at the right dose. Apple seeds, peach pits, and many other fruit seeds have natural cyanides, but it would take a bushel to hurt you. No one suggests that you don't eat apples or that you take out the seeds before juicing them. Imagine a protester at a produce section of your grocery store marching around the apples telling you they have cyanide in them. That's true, but it just doesn't matter. This is a version of that.

To get compounds to leach out at concerning quantities, the researchers had to use heroic measures nowhere near use conditions: Specifically, they took 50% Ethanol (AKA Everclear) put the pellets in that and baked it in a 140°F oven for 10 days. (So don't do that.) From this, they extracted over-limit amounts of 1-dodecene, which is used in detergents, Benzophenone, which is an odor in perfumes and soaps, and two variants of Cinnamaldehyde, which is the chemical (natural or synthetic) that makes cinnamon taste and smell like cinnamon.

All in all, what they found were chemicals from consumer soap, sunscreen and detergent products, with the Cinnemaldehyde probably coming from horchata bottles, which were mentioned in the article as a source of the recycled plastic. Your actual exposure to these chemicals from the recycled plastic would be trivial in a use case, as proven by the study's experiment with milk. The exposure you get to this class of chemicals is much larger if you ever wash your hair, dishes, clothes, body or hands with anything that smells like anything. There are strong arguments not to buy products that add any odor, natural or synthetic. Metric tons of these and other fragrance chemicals are put in detergents and soaps every year, which means they are made go down the drain where they do vast harm to ecosystems.

Stepping into the life of these bottles, I see a kid anointed with perfumed sunscreen on the beach drinking an horchata, which she dutifully recycled after she was done. This is a picture of a normal working or middle class life in Europe or America. There is nothing in this plastic that can harm you at normal use, so in my mind, we have a duty to follow the lead of nature and recycle it. The idea that we must make a world where every item is purged of any signs of life indulges the kind of purity concept that will ultimately burn this place down.

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That's really it, but I did promise to detail the FDA guidance on how a recycler needs to test their cleaning process to be sure that they could clear pesticides, etc., from a milk bottle, in case it sat in a puddle with something floating on it. This has gotten long so I'll do it in a separate post, here.