91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

There is an excellent Planet Money podcast about this from NPR [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912150085/waste-land

Fitting, I just started looking into reusing plastic myself by collecting plastic from my own, family and friends trash and remoulding it into something useful. In my quest for this, I found Precious Plastic, an amazing community around recycling plastics yourself and for your community. https://preciousplastic.com/

While individuals plastic pollution is not the biggest emitter of plastic here in the world, we can always take small steps towards making sure we don't throw as much plastic as we currently do.

This is the drop in the oceans. If people start to buy low single use plastic intensity products, the producers will start to reduce and it starts the pump for changes.

Usually just buying less helps a lot.

Method started out as a stealthily eco-friendly company, and when they first introduced refills for their products they did not make the container recyclable but did a big defense of that.

They claimed recycling of plastic loses a large fraction of the input as waste, and recyclables/recycled materials have to be bulkier. They could make a very thin nonrecyclable package that had less plastic than the unrecoverable fraction of a recyclable alternative, and reduce shipping costs/footprint in the process. So sometimes less of a bad thing is better than more of a mediocre thing.

They have since marked that packaging as recyclable, so I don’t know whether they found a workaround or are participating in the recycling mythos now.