Picture this: After tossing a single-use plastic bottle into your curbside recycling bin, it gets picked up and trucked to a material recovery facilit

That Plastic Bottle You Thought You Recycled May Have Been ‘Downcycled’ Instead

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2025-01-20 02:00:13

Picture this: After tossing a single-use plastic bottle into your curbside recycling bin, it gets picked up and trucked to a material recovery facility, or MRF. Once there, it’s separated from the paper, glass, and metal and sorted into groups of similar plastics.

Your bottle – and countless others – are then packed into a rectangular bale, sold as a commodity, and sent to another facility to be sorted by color, shredded, sanitized, melted down, and molded into smaller, smoother bits of plastic called “nurdles.”

Finally, the rice-sized remains of your bottle are purchased again, melted again, and fashioned into another bottle, ready to be filled with a fruity or fizzy drink.

This example is the best-case scenario for plastic bottles, but unfortunately it is not the norm. Plastic recycling is cumbersome and expensive, and in many cases, new “virgin plastics” are cheaper than recycled plastics.

Less than 30% of plastic bottles are recycled in the U.S., but technically speaking, most are “downcycled.” Also known as cascaded recycling or open-loop recycling, downcycling occurs when a material is remade into an item of lower quality. These items typically can’t be recycled again, which cuts an item’s overall life cycle short.