(GUF) BAEKELAND'S FOLLY

Outside of PET bottles and the odd bit of HDPE, recycling is smoke, mirrors and a big fat lucrative oil pipeline. Geneva proved just how divided things are; the EU, several African states and a Latin American coalition pushed for binding caps on virgin polymer whilst the US, China and petro-states cling to the stupid fantasy that recycling alone will save us.

When your flagship recyclers across the globe are openly admitting 'this isn’t viable at scale', you’d expect urgency to swing towards cutting output; instead, negotiators are being fed an escape hatch: 'if mechanical doesn’t work, maybe chemical recycling will save the day' - (spoiler alert) that's not a plan, that’s a stalling tactic.

Every tonne that isn’t recycled is a guaranteed sale of virgin resin and as long as oil stays cheap, petrochemical majors are laughing. They wrap it up in noble PR terms 'essential plastics' for health, food security, medicine etc while their social media pimps pump out sermons on the life-saving wonders of single-use. The hard truth is that 70–80% of plastics are functionally unrecyclable and when the treaty finally accepts that, maybe urgency could finally shift toward upstream measures; caps on virgin polymer, bans on design-for-waste formats and phase-outs of the worst offenders because if it dodges again, expect another decade of voluntary pledges 🥱 glossy PowerPoints and deeper fossil lock-in.

The oil industry hasn’t 'won' yet, but they’re playing the long game and every year of delay is another victory. The treaty could still matter hugely but only when the negotiators admit that they're treating lung cancer with cough syrup.

Designing and manufacturing a material with no end-of-life solution isn’t innovation, it’s selfish, cynical, and irresponsible. If companies are going to profit from plastics, they need to do one of two things - restrict production to polymers with a proven recycling route or pay directly for their destruction through incineration not by hiding behind some wreck of a convoluted EPR scheme.

Kicking the can down the road has kept producers comfortable since Leo Baekeland came up with Bakelite in 1907 but it’s buried the real cost in everyone else’s lap. If “circular economy” is to mean anything, it has to start with stopping the flow of materials that never had a chance of being circular in the first place. More like this (plastics) - link - they knew it was lies - link