This story was initially printed by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

No plastic is actually recyclable — not even the water bottles and milk jugs that individuals often toss into their blue bins.

According to a brand new report launched on Monday by Greenpeace USA, no plastic product meets a typical {industry} normal for recyclability, though they bear the acquainted “chasing arrows” recycling image. The report says industry-backed recycling labels on yogurt cups, ketchup bottles, meals trays, and different merchandise perpetuate a “fiction” that recycling will ever scale as much as deal with the 380 million tons of plastic that firms churn out yearly. The U.S. plastic recycling fee has by no means topped 10 p.c, and a report from earlier this yr revealed that it has now fallen to just 5 percent.

“Corporations are hiding behind plastics recycling and hoping that it will completely solve the plastic waste crisis that they have helped create,” stated Lisa Ramsden, a senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace USA. She referred to as on firms to scale down plastic manufacturing and substitute single-use merchandise and packaging with reusable alternate options, like bottles that may be refilled.

Greenpeace’s report, titled Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, builds on a previous report the group printed in 2020. Back then, the group discovered that solely sure sorts of bottles and jugs met the federal authorities’s definition for “recyclable” and will legally bear the chasing arrows image: Those bearing the numbers 1 and a couple of to point the sort of materials they’re product of, polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high-density polyethylene (HDPE), respectively.

The similar remains to be true right now: Most recycling services don’t settle for or recycle plastics numbered from 3 to 7, like polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polypropylene, and polystyrene as a result of they’re troublesome to kind and sometimes contaminated with poisonous chemical compounds. But Greenpeace’s most up-to-date report additionally highlighted an abysmal recycling fee for those who meet the federal government’s definition of recyclable, which solely considers whether or not individuals have entry to recycling services for a given sort of plastic. According to the group’s evaluation, the precise reprocessing fee for bottles and jugs product of PET (number one) is just 21 p.c, and about 10 p.c for HDPE (quantity 2).

These numbers fall far wanting an industry-backed normal from the nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation, or EMF, which defines a product as recyclable solely whether it is recycled 30 p.c of the time. Hundreds of major companies — from Clorox to the meals large Mondelez — have signed a dedication agreeing to this definition, but their merchandise continue to feature the chasing arrows symbol.

Although {industry} teams insist that plastic recycling could be improved with higher assortment infrastructure, Greenpeace says this can be a fallacy. All plastics share related issues: They’re extraordinarily troublesome to gather and kind, they launch hazardous chemical compounds in the course of the recycling course of, and they’re usually so contaminated with poisonous chemical compounds that they should be “down-cycled” into lower-value merchandise, despatched to a landfill, or incinerated. These challenges make plastic recycling too pricey for firms. “It’s just cheaper to buy new plastic,” Ramsden stated.

Instead of doubling down on recycling, Greenpeace calls on firms to scale back their plastic packaging by at the least 50 p.c by 2030, both by eliminating it altogether or by changing it with reusable supplies. For instance, a smooth drink firm may transfer towards the “milkman concept,” as Ramsden put it — a refillable system through which customers return glass bottles as soon as they’re carried out utilizing them. The report additionally says firms ought to remove single-use plastics altogether, launch annual information on their plastic packaging use and discount charges, and push governments to undertake insurance policies to slash plastic manufacturing, together with the global plastic treaty that U.N. member states are planning to barter by 2024.

“Plastics recycling is absolutely not the solution” to the plastic air pollution disaster, Ramsden stated. As a primary step, she inspired firms to take away the recycling image from plastic merchandise, since most of them are by no means recycled. The chasing arrows are “deceptive to consumers,” she stated, “who assume that the plastic packaging they’re buying can be recycled, but it cannot be.”