Today marks the beginning of Plastic Free July, an annual campaign coordinated by the Plastic Free Foundation to raise awareness of the negative impacts of plastic pollution and to encourage individuals to reduce their consumption of single-use plastics. Check out my recent post on the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center blog which offers tips to reduce your use of plastics at home, at work, and on the go. You can also check out Plastic Free July posts I wrote for the ISTC blog in the last couple of years: “Plastic Free July: Tips for reducing plastic pollution from your clothing and textiles” (from 2024) and “Celebrate Plastic-Free July: Atypical tips to reduce your use of single-use plastics” (from 2023). If you’re just starting to think about ways to reduce plastics in your life, you might want to read these posts in chronological order, starting with the one from 2023.

Why is it so important to reduce your use of plastic? The answer is complicated and thoroughly depressing.

Humanity has generated a huge amount of the various types of plastics. Globally, annual production of plastics reached 460 million metric tons (Mt) in 2019, and is expected to triple by 2060. When considering the fate of all plastic ever produced as of 2015, Geyer et al. estimated that “approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment. If current production and waste management trends continue, roughly 12,000 Mt of plastic waste will be in landfills or in the natural environment by 2050.” Even if plastic recycling was as effective as possible, recycling alone would never be enough to address this amount of material. Reducing plastic production and use is essential.

And alas, plastic recycling is not very effective for a variety of reasons. Collection and processing infrastructure varies from location to location, as do available finances, population, regulations, and other factors. This means that where plastic recycling programs exist, they vary in terms of what specific items are accepted, leading to consumer confusion, and the resulting contamination of recycling streams. Even with clean collections of the different types of plastic (PET or #1, HDPE or #2, etc.) recycling depends on market demand for the recycled plastics as opposed to “virgin” plastics (manufactured directly from petrochemical or biochemical feedstocks, which have not yet been used to create a plastic product). If virgin plastics are cheaper to use and no regulations exist requiring a certain percentage of recycled plastic be used, manufacturers will often opt for using virgin material. The recycling of plastics is also technically limited, because unlike aluminum or glass which can be “infinitely recycled” without impact to the quality of the resulting material, the quality of plastics degrades with each subsequent pass through the recycling process. Recycling plastics, where possible, and using products made with postconsumer recycled plastics is certainly better than sending all plastics for burial in landfills or incineration or increasing demand for virgin plastics. But because plastics degrade over time, even if they are recycled a few times, ultimately, they will become waste.

You’ve likely seen footage of or heard about the great patches of plastic garbage floating in our oceans and seen photos of wildlife trapped in packaging or killed by ingesting large quantities of plastic. But it’s not just large pieces of plastic that are the problem. Whether it has made its way into the environment as litter or whether it’s sitting on the shelf at a store or in your home, plastics break down over time. Period. They degrade into smaller pieces (microplastics and even smaller nanoplastics) and these tiny bits of plastic pollution have been found in virtually every habitat on Earth, even in protected areas, from the ocean floor to Arctic sea ice. And in us. Humans regularly inhale and ingest microplastics, and plastics have been found in human brains, livers, and kidneys, placentas, breastmilk, and a variety of other human organs. Essentially, wherever we look for plastic pollution, we find it. And the worst thing is, we don’t fully understand how this impacts environmental or human health. It’s not just the presence of physical particles in our blood and organs clogging up our systems but also the amazing array of chemicals, many of which are toxic, that are incorporated into various plastics. These include chemicals to make plastics softer or more flexible, to make them more durable or transparent, or dyes to make them different colors, among other things. A report published in 2024 (“State of the Science on Plastic Chemicals: Identifying and addressing chemicals and polymers of concern“) identified 16,325 compounds that are potentially used or unintentionally present in plastics and that over 4200 or 25% of plastic chemicals are of concern because they are hazardous to human health and the environment.

If this all feels overwhelming, all I can say is I’m oversimplifying the situation. If you want to dive deeply into these issues, you can check out a recent report I co-authored with colleagues at the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, “Illinois Materials Management & Recycling Opportunities,” available at https://hdl.handle.net/2142/127016. My primary contribution was to work on the chapter on plastics. The “Impacts on Environmental and Human Health” section of the plastics chapter begins on page 65.

Suffice it to say, Plastic Free July is not just some fluffy treehugger idea. It’s important to all of us, everywhere to reduce our use of plastics, and not just in July but every day in every possible way. The truth is that we will never divorce ourselves completely from plastics at this point. We’ve done too much to integrate them into so many aspects of our society that this would be impossible. And there are circumstances in which plastics should be used. For example, I might tell you to avoid water in plastic bottles and choose tap water instead, but I would never deny that those disposable bottles of water are important during relief efforts after a natural disaster. In some situations, we need to use plastic. But we must do everything we can to eliminate non-essential uses of plastic, to design plastics from safer materials, and to improve collection for recycling and recycling methods for those instances in which plastics cannot be avoided. Plastic Free July is a starting point, to help folks understand why this is important, and to help them begin to think about ways to avoid plastic.

I’ve given you lots to think about and pointed you toward three of my Plastic Free July posts elsewhere. In the coming weeks, I’ll write more here on the JoySNess blog to provide resources to help you reduce and avoid plastics, to share examples of what others are doing, and to help you understand the challenges.