Almost every piece of plastic ever made is still with us. Break down plastic and it doesn’t really go anywhere, it fractures into pieces, tiny beads called microplastics, smaller again and you get nanoplastics. It lines the stomachs of turtles and whales and fish, it slips into our food, it’s in the air we breathe, it falls with the snow and rises in a toxic cloud when burnt. Scientists estimate each of us ingests the equivalent of one credit card’s worth of plastic – every week.

Plastics are not found in nature. We cooked them up in the lab. Hardy and pliable, they have made much of modern life remarkably convenient. But it’s generally easier and cheaper to make new plastic than it is to recycle the old stuff. That means about 90 per cent of plastic has never been recycled at all, however diligently we fill up our yellow bins. As China and parts of the developing world stop taking the West’s excess plastic waste, the pile-up is only growing.

Yet while companies (and consumers) come under increasing pressure to use plastic less, more plastic plants are opening around the world. With demand for fossil fuels shrinking in the shift to green energy, experts say big companies are eyeing plastic as their next big money-maker. At the same time, the quest for a plastic that can be recycled or biodegrade easily, a circuit-breaker to change how plastic fits into the world, is ramping up too –as is a push for a UN treaty against plastic pollution.

Why is so much plastic still being made? Is recycling really solving the problem? Why has the big clean-up been left to consumers? And what can be done to stop plastic choking our oceans and wilderness?

What is plastic and where did it come from?

The secret sauce of plastic is that it’s both flexible and strong; it can be moulded into almost any shape, from the thin film wrapping your biscuits to the unyielding cable keeping an astronaut from floating off into space. And it doesn’t wear out. That’s because it’s a type of polymer – those long chains of molecules that repeat on and on like entwined paper clips. Under the microscope, plastic is “beautiful ... a cathedral that goes on for miles,” a chemist gushes to Susan Freinkel in her book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. Spider silk and even our DNA strands are natural polymers but plastic, which today is made almost exclusively out of fossil fuels, had to be invented. And it started with elephants and exploding billiard balls.

In the mid-1800s, the game of pool was growing in popularity but its balls were made from the ivory of elephant tusks, and hunting was starting to wipe out the species. Billiard companies began searching for alternatives. Phelan & Collender even offered a “handsome fortune” in gold to anyone who could invent one. John Wesley made “celluloid” from the compound celloise found in wood, cotton and straw (and used in gunpowder). Unlike an earlier attempt at plastic, his celluloid could be mass-produced, and it mimicked more expensive materials such as ivory. The problem? It was also highly combustible. As Hyatt wrote, two balls hitting each other on the pool table would sometimes create “a mild explosion like a percussion guncap” causing “every man in the room to [pull] his gun”. He never claimed that reward.

Since the 1950s, we have produced more than 8 billion tonnes of the stuff (that’s more than one tonne of plastic for every person alive today).

But by the 20th century, less-flammable plastics such as Bakelite (made from coal tar) followed and mass-production techniques improved. It was hoped that plastic, more versatile and less expensive than most metals, would help lift people out of poverty. Its production didn’t really ramp up until World War II, when fighter pilots sat in cockpits made of shatter-proof plastic (plexiglass) and wore plastic raincoats and helmets.

Tupperware, in new colours and shapes, arrived post-war, transforming kitchens around the Western world; plastic instruments improved medical care and cheap plastic packaging revolutionised the food industry. Eventually, single-use straws, bottles and sachets exploded onto the market. The plastic age had begun. Since the 1950s, we have produced more than 8 billion tonnes of the stuff (that’s more than one tonne of plastic for every person alive today).

What is the problem with plastic and can recycling help?

There are now islands made of plastic. One is the size of a continent: a sea of trash three times bigger than France, spinning in the Pacific Ocean. It took the American captain who discovered this Great Pacific Garbage Patch in 1997 seven days to cross. But most of the plastic in the ocean is beneath the surface. Some 14 million more tonnes of it leak into the seas every year. And when the animals and seabirds who eat it wash up dead onshore, only their bodies decay, not the plastic in their bellies. In a few decades, scientists expect that, tonne for tonne, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish.

“You know how most of the [carbon emissions] in the atmosphere today were only put there in the past few decades? Plastics is like that too,” says senior lawyer at the Center for International Environmental Law Steven Feit, who has been tracking the impact of plastics around the globe. “It’s only exploded relatively recently.”

And, just as big coal and oil executives were warned early on by scientists about the planet-warming effect of burning fossil fuels, so too did “big plastic” realise their miracle material came with a cost. In 1969, a top manager at Dow Chemical warned a packaging conference about a coming deluge of plastic waste due to its “disposal problems”, which he claimed the industry was turning a blind eye to. Five years later, another industry insider gave a speech warning “there is serious doubt that [recycling] can ever be made viable on an economic basis”.

In landfill, paper takes between two and six weeks to decompose, and an orange peel six months. But plastics are estimated to last hundreds, even thousands of years.

Even today, only certain plastics can be melted down and made into new products (that’s why some soft plastics, like plastic shopping bags, clog up recycling hauls). And most of what can be reused is really “downcycled” – made into a poorer-quality product. A plastic bottle might live just two extra lives before it has to be incinerated or tossed in landfill.

Once it’s “trash”, there comes the problem of what to do with it. In landfill, paper takes between two and six weeks to decompose, and an orange peel six months. But plastics are estimated to last hundreds, even thousands of years. “We don’t really know when it will go away, it hasn’t been around that long for us to know,” Feit says. He calls plastic pollution its own “unrestrained experiment on the biosphere”. “Once these microplastics are in ecosystems they’re nearly impossible to remove and there’s still a lot we don’t understand about how it’s affecting them – and us.”

The World Health Organisation warns that extra waste from disposable masks, gloves, and other medical gear during the pandemic are straining waste systems even further.

But, instead of financing solutions back in the ’70s (or changing product designs), the plastic industry put its money into public recycling campaigns. The Keep America Beautiful charity behind the “crying Indian” ads urging people to pick up their plastic waste was actually bankrolled by big plastic. Feit says the recycling spin continues. “We’re told if we put our recycling in the right bin, we’ve done our job. There’s an over-representation of what [recycling] can do and that’s shifted the burden onto the consumer.”

Until recently, the scale of the problem had been out of sight, our excess waste shipped overseas. While much of it was still unable to be recycled there, its convenient removal from our shores created an illusion that the system could cope with our waste, Feit says. It can’t.

How could we clean up Australian recycling?

In the year before China’s plastic waste import ban came into force under Operation National Sword in 2018, Australia was exporting more than half its waste plastic overseas, including about 36 per cent to China. Waste from the West was redirected to poorer countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey and Indonesia for recycling but as it piled up, leaking into the environment, most nations began to impose their own restrictions. “It had a ripple effect,” says US chemist Brett Helms at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Australia has since been building more recycling plants of its own, but the industry has been rocked by revelations that some soft plastics recycling programs were secretly stockpiling plastic and sending it to landfill.

In 2021, state and territory environment ministers agreed to “bin harmonisation”: a plan to standardise recycling collection so that, as the federal minister of the time Sussan Ley put it, there wouldn’t be one system in Western Sydney and one in Bondi.

Industry groups say that intervention is needed at the other end of the market too. Although most jurisdictions in Australia are banning single-use plastics, the companies producing plastic products still face few rules. And a 2021 government review found that violations of what packaging rules do exist weren’t being investigated by the states.

Rose Read of the National Waste and Recycling Industry Council wants regulation similar to that in Europe, where manufacturers help pay for recycling infrastructure and must guarantee their product can be recycled. Helms points to taxes on new plastic packaging in the UK.

“We need to look at product design,” agrees Gayle Sloan, head of Australia’s Waste Management and Resource Recovery Association. “We can only do so much with what we get.”

“Solutions that focus on plastic as a waste issue, a recycling issue, and not a production issue feel like … someone cleaning up a junk drawer instead of the rest of a messy house.”

At UNSW, Professor Veena Sahajwalla has helped invent various clever ways to reuse the plastic no one wants. That includes turning car tyres into steel to help decarbonise steelmaking by replacing the black coking coal normally used; harnessing the metallic lining of chip packets in green aluminum manufacturing; and, at the height of the pandemic, turning old plastic printers into face shields for hospital staff. But Sahajwalla says producers must be encouraged (or regulated) to avoid mixing materials so it’s easier to harvest them for recycling. The drink bottle made of valuable PET plastic, for example, shouldn’t come with that pesky vinyl label.

Feit sees it this way: “Solutions that focus on plastic as a waste issue, a recycling issue, and not a production issue feel like … someone cleaning up a junk drawer instead of the rest of a messy house. We have to stop making more of it.”

What does plastic have to do with climate change?

The impact of plastic is most keenly felt at the end of its life cycle – when it won’t go away, when it’s clogging beaches and rivers. But Feit and other campaigners note that’s just one part of the story. Plastic is made from fossil fuel run-offs and both producing it and burning it create emissions. “It’s something like two-and-a-half tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent for every tonne of plastic you make and another two-and-a-half tonnes per tonne of plastic you burn,” Feit says. “So once you hit the store shelves, at least half of its emissions are already blown. And it’s growing.”

In the past four decades, plastic production has quadrupled, and the World Economic Forum expects it will double in the next 20 years. If that trend continues, scientists estimate, emissions from plastic will make up 15 per cent of the world’s remaining carbon budget by 2050.

“We’re still not joining the dots. I hate the word rubbish. All of this is a resource.”

Meanwhile, tiny plastic particles can interfere with how the seas store carbon. And research out of Hawaii suggests plastic gives off a small amount of greenhouse gases itself as it slowly degrades in the environment, depending on surface area. ”We may be adding this centuries-long source of emissions,” Feit says.

On the other hand, Sloan says that the potential emissions reduction from a truly circular plastics system in Australia, has not been properly examined. “We’re still not joining the dots. I hate the word rubbish. All of this is a resource.”

So, while some worry that concerns about plastic distract from the bigger game of climate change (and are often fronts for corporate greenwashing), environmental campaigners are beginning to link plastics to the broader struggle against runaway resource consumption – a beach awash with waste in the Pacific is connected to an oil pipeline in the US.

Why is more plastic being made then?

The real story of plastics, experts say, is that they are a new way for fossil fuels to flow through the economy. Feit describes plastics as the other side of the fossil fuel industry: they’re made from the same source (except for the “vanishingly small” percentage of plastic made from biological sources) and often end up in the same place (the atmosphere).

Despite calls for reductions, even more plastic plants are opening. This is at least partly driven by a boom in fracking: hydraulic mining that has made more oil and gas accessible – and with them, a chemical called ethane, which is “one of the main feedstocks of plastic”, Feit says. “It’s become a way to monetise this other piece of the fossil fuel mix.” (In the US, the fracking boom has already seen companies invest a collective $200 billion in more than 300 new plastics projects.)

Just a few corporations are behind most plastic production, many of them fossil-fuel giants. Research from the not-for-profit Minderoo (chaired by Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest) with the University of Oxford, traced half of the world’s single-use plastic to just 20 big companies (ExxonMobil was at the top with China’s Sinopec and Dow chemicals).

Petrochemicals such as plastic now account for 14 per cent of all oil use, and will drive half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, just as experts are warning we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

How can we stop plastic filling up the planet?

Plastic may be a neat solution to many problems, but it doesn’t come with one easy fix itself. “If you think about the old pyramid – reduce, reuse, recycle – now there’s a bunch more Rs, like refuse and redesign,” says Feit. “There’s some stuff we straight up don’t need, superfluous packaging.” Part of the fight will involve dispelling myths about germs, and the “hygiene theatre” that has sprung up during the pandemic, he says.

Still, the modern lifestyle is so built on plastic, throwing it out overnight is unlikely. “We could use a lot less plastic but, overall, plastics are too useful,” says chemistry professor Thomas Maschmeyer at the University of Sydney. “They’re often less [emissions-intensive to make] and transport goods than glass and metal. We need to make the economy circular, so things keep moving through. But we don’t have to reinvent a whole trillion-dollar industry.”

That’s why the holy grail of recycling is to find a plastic that won’t destroy the planet, either because it can biodegrade or because it can be infinitely recycled, and so never thrown away.

When we melt and reuse plastic now, each cycle degrades the quality, explains Dr Corinne Scown at the Lawrence Berkley lab. All the dyes and additives stick around.

Helm and Scown at Berkeley believe they have found a way to break down plastic at a molecular level, untainted, and so begin an “infinite” cycle of recycling with a new type of plastic. Existing methods for deconstructing plastics do exist, but what comes back is usually much less than what went in. Berkeley’s “PDK” plastic – which Scown says feels a lot like the stuff her spectacle frames are made of – is said to come out indistinguishable from new and could be used as everything from car parts to bottles. Their analysis puts production emissions on par or lower than conventional plastic, with initial costs falling the more it is reused.

Meanwhile, Maschmeyer is part of a team rolling out a new reactor in the UK that can convert old plastic into oil. It takes low-quality kind destined for landfill or the incinerator; and the plant is powered by the waste itself, with even the water recycled through. In Australia, which generates more than 3 million tonnes of plastic waste annually, he envisions about 20 such plants would process 600,000 tonnes. Already a demonstration plant in NSW processes between 5000 and 10,000 tonnes a year. “We can take about 50 to 60 per cent of everything in Australia, 1.5 million tonnes.” Taking more will require a tweak to how recycling is collected, he says.

Still, even this reactor isn’t producing an infinite plastic. “You always have to add a little bit of energy, there are always losses,” he says.

Many companies and labs have touted breakthroughs in plastic, Feit says, but they are often emissions-intensive and expensive in their own right, and mostly used as fuel. Likewise, plastics feted as biodegradable are often just more likely to break down into hazardous microplastics. (Australia’s CSIRO says it’s working on developing a truly biodegradable plastic).

Scown agrees “there’s no silver bullet”. “We need all hands on deck to solve this problem.”

But momentum is building too around an international treaty to stop plastic pollution. (Groups such as CIEL want restrictions on new plastic production and waste exports.)

And then there’s the legacy plastic clean-up. Everything from nanobots to plastic-eating bacteria have been suggested for the task. Maschmeyer has even offered the UN one of his reactors that could be fitted on an old oil tanker to travel the seas perpetually, pulling out plastic and converting it onboard into fuel. Still, he and Feit stress that efforts must first focus on cutting off plastic at its source.

Helms is hopeful that one day jobs in circular plastics could help lift up the same poor communities used as the West’s dumping grounds.

“But we have precious little time to do this and change the course.”

With additional reporting by Nick O’Malley