Who Said Recycling Was Green? It Makes Microplastics By the Ton
James Bruggers | May 16, 2023 | Inside Climate News
Research out of Scotland suggests that the chopping, shredding and washing of plastic in recycling facilities may turn as much as six to 13 percent of incoming waste into microplastics—tiny, toxic particles that are an emerging and ubiquitous environmental health concern for the planet and people.
A team of four researchers measured and analyzed microplastics in wastewater before and after filters were installed at an anonymous recycling plant in the United Kingdom. The study, one of the first of its kind, was published in the May issue of in the peer-reviewed Journal of Hazardous Material Advances.
If the team’s calculations are ultimately found to be representative of the recycling industry as a whole, the scale of microplastics created during recycling processes would be shocking—perhaps as much as 400,000 tons per year in the United States alone, or the equivalent of about 29,000 dump trucks of microplastics. The study suggests that rather than helping to solve plastics’ contribution to what the United Nations has described as a triple planetary crisis of pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss, recycling could be exacerbating the problem by creating an even more vexing conundrum.
Other scientists are finding microplastics in human blood, human placentas and in virtually all corners of the planet, and the United Nations has warned that chemicals in microplastics are associated with serious health impacts including changes to human genetics, brain development and reproduction.
The paper was published as United Nations delegates prepare to hold their second meeting to negotiate a potential global plastics treaty later this month in Paris, with one potential outcome being more plastics recycling as the chemical and plastics industry presses governments to keep plastic in the global economy.
“It seems quite backward to me,” said plastics researcher Erena Brown, who led the research while she was a graduate student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. “With plastic recycling, we have designed and initiated it in order to start protecting our environment. I think this study has shown that we have ended up creating a different if potentially slightly worse problem.”
The recycling plant allowed researchers to measure microplastics in wastewater before and after the plant installed filters, which Brown said definitely helped to reduce microplastics.
But even with filters, the study found that the mechanical recycling process that produced plastic pellets to make new plastic products could still allow as much as 75 billion particles of microplastics in a cubic meter of the plant’s wastewater.
In all, they calculated the plant would annually release as much as 3 million pounds of microplastics with filtration, and up to 6.5 million pounds without filtration.
The study measured microplastics down to a size of 1.6 microns, which Brown said was smaller than two other similar studies that the researchers found. Still, she said, with the widespread prevalence of even smaller micro and nano plastics, smaller than the study’s size limit, the researchers believe their findings underestimate the problem.
“We assume that there are many, many, many particles in sizes smaller than this,” she said.
The researchers also detected microplastics in the air at the recycling facility and suggested that such air emissions should be the focus of additional research since breathing microplastics is a risk to lung health.
