Nearly ninety percent of U.S. states are failing to adequately address plastic pollution, underscoring evidence of a system failure in a new report by the Ocean Conservancy. The U.S. generates 40 million metric tons of plastic waste every year, or about 287 pounds per person. And every year, that mountain of waste grows by another 11 million tons globally.
America’s plastic crisis is financial as much as it is environmental. Managing plastic waste in the U.S. costs over $32 billion annually. Yet only 5 percent of plastic waste is actually recycled here. Without scalable solutions, that burden will only grow, dragging down communities, budgets, and ecosystems alike.
We don’t lack awareness of the issue. Instead, we’ve doubled down on strategies that don’t work or don’t scale. While plastics transformed modern life with their durability and versatility, our waste management systems never evolved to handle them. The result: clogged rivers, growing landfills, and a patchwork of inconsistent and often ineffective state policies.
Take Mississippi—with virtually no regulations addressing plastic waste, the Mississippi River, the largest watershed in the U.S., has become a major pipeline for pollution into the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile California has invested heavily in regulation and bans, but at high economic cost and with limited nationwide impact.
Recycling, often touted as the cornerstone of circularity, is failing us. Globally, only 9 percent of plastic is actually recycled. That’s because the current system depends on unrealistic levels of sorting at the household level. If any item is contaminated with leftover food or the last drops of a beauty product, it’s likely headed for the landfill or incinerator. Even in Europe, with more advanced infrastructure, the vast majority of plastic waste is still discarded.
For nearly three years negotiations have been underway for the Global Plastics Treaty with the goal to address plastic waste by uplifting circular economies. No deal has been agreed upon yet, but I am watching closely to see what will happen after the next slate of negotiations finish next week.
Even if negotiations are successful, it’s clear that policy alone won’t solve this problem. What we need is technology that integrates seamlessly with existing consumer behavior and market forces.
Rather than hope consumers overhaul their habits or wait for governments to sync up, we need to be scaling innovations that process all waste, including unsorted and organic, and convert it into a product that’s actually useful. That’s the shift we need: not more clean-up campaigns, but real circular solutions. I’ve spent decades in the plastics and chemical industries, and I’ve seen how legacy systems can either cling to the past or embrace transformation.
America’s patchwork of recycling laws will take years, if not decades, to harmonize. Innovation moves faster than legislation, and the private sector is uniquely positioned to lead. Waiting for perfect policy alignment or consumer enlightenment exacerbates the crisis and prolongs the speed of progress.
Traditional industries, often viewed as part of the problem, can become powerful drivers of the solution if they adopt technologies that align profitability with sustainability. When they offer solutions that require no behavior change from the consumer, but all the benefits of a cleaner environment, everyone wins.
The solutions are here today. With the right technologies and public sector support, we can turn the very waste polluting our rivers and bodies into a resource that fuels sustainable industry. What we need is the will to act and the foresight to recognize that the future of waste isn’t disposal. It’s renewal. And it’s already here.
Albert Douer is the chairman and CEO of UBQ Materials, where he leads global expansion of waste-to-material solutions. For the first 30-plus years of his career, Albert led Darnel Group, which he expanded from a family-run company into a global corporation that became the first company to recycle PET water bottles into food packaging. Albert joined UBQ Materials to apply his deep knowledge of the plastics and chemicals industries to advance this unique solution for addressing plastic waste by turning organic and unrecyclable waste into a durable plastic alternative.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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