From August 5 to 14, 2025, the United Nations met in Geneva for final negotiations aimed at reaching an international treaty on plastic pollution. Industry representatives often present recycling as the ideal solution, but the core issue lies primarily in the overproduction of the material. The plastics industry thrives on ever more virgin plastic, regardless of recycling rates. Global plastic production has doubled over the past 15 years and shows no sign of slowing.
By Romain Tramoy, University of Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne (UPEC); Jean-François Ghiglione, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS); and Marie-France Dignac, INRAE
Is plastic recycling as effective as advertised?
In 2024, the California Attorney General sued oil giant ExxonMobil, accusing the company of misleading communication about plastic recycling. California’s Department of Justice denounced its “clever marketing, which promised that recycling would solve the problem of the ever-increasing amount of plastic waste produced by ExxonMobil.”
This unprecedented lawsuit reminds us, as the UN Ocean Conference (UNOC) began on June 9, that plastic recycling does not live up to the promises made by corporations and waste managers. In fact, 90% of annually produced plastic is not recycled.
The risk is that overly optimistic communication delays consumer awareness, with people content to sort their waste as expected. Yet plastics pose multiple dangers. They impact the environment and human health throughout their life cycle—whether they end up in the oceans or in soils through water runoff.
Polluting particles and substances are released at every stage of the plastics value chain: during oil extraction, plastic production, use, and waste management (or mismanagement). This includes wear from paints, textiles, agricultural plastics, and fishing nets.
The Limits of Recycling
Collection, sorting, and recycling infrastructures require large investments—often for limited returns, since recycled materials can cost more than virgin plastic made from petroleum.
Beyond economic attractiveness, recycling is constrained by the intrinsic properties of plastics. With each recycling cycle, the quality of the recovered material degrades, affecting the final properties of recycled plastics and limiting their applications. To compensate, more virgin raw materials and additives must be added to preserve desired characteristics.
Not all plastics are equally recyclable. Currently, only thermoplastics can be effectively recycled. Thermosets and elastomers are much harder to process at end of life.
Even for thermoplastics, the presence of chemical additives (plasticizers, stabilizers, colorants, flame retardants, etc.) reduces the proportion that can be recycled. This is significant because plastics contain about 16,000 chemical substances, one-quarter of which are considered toxic to the environment or human health. Toxic accumulation risks increase with recycling due to chemical degradation, recombination, and cross-contamination during use, storage, sorting, and transport.
Recycling or “Downcycling”?
Once plastic waste is transformed into flakes or pellets, there are two possible uses, depending on polymer quality and contaminants:
- Closed-loop recycling: recycled materials are mixed with virgin materials to regain their original application (e.g., clear PET bottles).
- Open-loop recycling (downcycling): low-quality recycled resins (from mixed plastics) are used in less demanding applications.
In reality, only a small fraction of plastics undergo closed-loop recycling. Most follow the downcycling path.
A third option, energy recovery (through incineration or conversion into fuels), is often misleadingly presented as recycling, even though no new material is produced.
Recycling Does Not Reduce Virgin Plastic Production
Recycling infrastructures are often justified by the argument that they reduce the need for virgin plastic. But is this really the case?
- In a baseline scenario where plastics contain about 10% recycled material, global virgin plastic production continues to rise almost identically to historical trends.
- In a more ambitious scenario, where 55% of plastics are recycled by 2030 (the target of the EU Plastics Pact), virgin production is delayed by about 20 years—but still increases exponentially.
- Even a 90% recycling rate, an unrealistic goal, only delays the rise of virgin plastic production by 70 years.
The most ambitious proposal, put forward by Rwanda and Peru during the treaty negotiations, calls for a 40% cut in virgin plastic production by 2040 compared to 2025 levels. Even then, global production in 2040 would match that of 2010.
In all cases, recycling has only a minor impact on virgin plastic production. And these estimates are likely overstated, since they assume plastics produced and consumed in a given year are immediately available for recycling—true only for packaging (about 40% of plastic production).
Ultimately, the fundamental issue remains: global virgin plastic production has doubled in the last 15 years and continues to climb, a trend foreseen as early as the 1972 Meadows Report on the growth of industrial production and its resulting pollution.
