We keep producing new plastic while discarded plastic piles up around us. The reason is not simply a failure of recycling technology. It is a failure of economics.
Written by Tatiana Heckles
For seven years, I lived on Jeju Island, South Korea, home to an extraordinary community of volunteers who give their time, week after week, to clearing plastic from the coastline. A good portion of what we picked up were single-use beverage bottles made from PET—polyethylene terephthalate, a durable plastic that can be recycled into new bottles, spun into polyester fiber or remade into other useful products.
As we worked, I often thought about a job I had as a teenager reshelving books at a public library. The stream of books waiting to be put away seemed endless.
Both tasks are Sisyphean. But the library was built around a circular system: books were checked out, returned, reshelved and enjoyed again and again. PET bottles mostly are not. Only about three out of every ten single-use plastic beverage bottles “checked out” of a convenience store ever get “reshelved” through recycling. The others are landfilled, incinerated or escape formal waste systems altogether—becoming the plastic pollution we find in rivers, along coastlines and in the ocean.
Why, I wondered, were we allowing so much usable PET to fall out of circulation when it could become new bottles, polyester fiber or other durable products?
That question eventually led me to build an activewear company around recycled PET, in part to demonstrate that the bottles we were pulling from beaches were not simply waste. They were raw material.
The apparel industry has already shown that this material can work at enormous scale. Polyester now accounts for 59% of global fiber production. Yet only about 12% of polyester is created from recycled PET. That low number is particularly striking because several of the world’s largest apparel companies have moved much further. Adidas reports that 99% of the polyester it uses is recycled. H&M Group says it has reached 100%. Nike reports 63%, up from 23% four years earlier. Patagonia began turning discarded plastic bottles into fleece more than three decades ago.
These are not laboratory experiments or niche exercises in sustainable fashion. They are evidence that recycled PET can replace virgin polyester at commercial scale.
The companies themselves cite similar reasons for making the change: lower carbon emissions, reduced dependence on virgin fossil resources and a productive use for material that might otherwise become waste.
So the question is no longer simply whether recycled PET works.
The question is why, when enormous quantities of PET are already in circulation, and too often accumulating as waste, are we still making nearly nine out of every ten tons of polyester from virgin fossil fuel resources?
The answer is economics.
Virgin PET begins with oil and natural gas. Those fossil resources are refined into standardized petrochemical feedstocks and manufactured into resin through a global system built over decades to deliver enormous and predictable volumes. Producers can buy material of known specifications from an established supply chain.
Recycled PET begins somewhere much less convenient: in our waste.
A discarded bottle must be collected. Then transported. Sorted. Separated from contamination. Cleaned. Processed. And eventually converted back into material manufacturers can use.
Every one of those steps costs money.
A 2024 report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology illustrates the problem. For general recycling programs in the United States, collection costs can exceed $300 a ton, with processing adding roughly another $100. Those numbers are not PET-specific, but they expose the structural disadvantage facing recycled material: before it can compete with virgin resin, someone has to pay to retrieve it from the waste stream.
And that someone is often not the company that sold the plastic in the first place. Municipal waste departments collect it. Households pay waste fees. Taxpayers finance recycling infrastructure. Nonprofits organize cleanups. Volunteers pull bottles from beaches and rivers. Governments pay for sorting facilities, balers, transportation and recovery programs. These are, in effect, a hidden subsidy behind cheap virgin plastic.
The price paid for virgin resin reflects the cost of manufacturing and delivering it. But it does not include a corresponding obligation to finance what happens to that material after it is sold.
Plastic manufacturers, of course, pay corporate taxes and the other taxes imposed on businesses. But paying taxes is not the same thing as paying proportionately for the recovery of the material a company places on the market. A company can sell another thousand tons of plastic without automatically becoming responsible for financing the collection and processing of those thousand tons when they become waste. The cost of production stays on the corporate ledger. Much of the cost of recovery lands somewhere else.
That accounting choice helps explain an extraordinary imbalance. A 2025 analysis published in Communications Earth & Environment estimated that the world produced about 400 million metric tons of plastic in 2022. Roughly 362 million tons came from virgin resin. Only about 38 million tons came from mechanically recycled plastic. More than 90 percent of plastic production was still being supplied by new material.
That same year, the world generated nearly 268 million metric tons of plastic waste. About 38 million tons were mechanically recycled. More than 100 million tons were landfilled, roughly 90 million tons were incinerated and nearly 30 million tons were mismanaged.
We are trying to empty the bathtub while the tap remains wide open. Recycling cannot meaningfully reduce the stock of plastic pollution if we continue adding virgin material to the economy much faster than we recover what is already there.
PET is only one polymer, but its economics expose the larger problem. And that problem may become more consequential as the energy economy changes. Electric vehicles and greater fuel efficiency are reducing the long-term importance of petroleum as a transportation fuel. But oil has another enormous market: petrochemicals, the building blocks for products including packaging, synthetic fibers and plastics.
The International Energy Agency’s 2025 outlook projects that even as overall oil demand peaks around 2030 under its stated-policies scenario, oil use for petrochemicals continues growing beyond that point. In other words, a transition away from burning petroleum does not necessarily mean an end to extracting it. Fossil carbon can instead be turned into products. That creates a powerful incentive to keep virgin plastic cheap.
For decades, governments have largely approached plastic pollution as though the problem begins after a product is discarded. Consumers are told to recycle more carefully. Municipalities are told to improve collection. Communities are asked to build better waste-management systems. Environmental organizations should organize cleanups.
But by the time a plastic bottle reaches a beach, nearly every important economic decision about it has already been made. The producer chose the material. The producer chose the packaging. The producer chose how much of it to sell. The producer chose the markets in which to sell it.
Then responsibility for recovering it was largely handed to everyone else. There is a policy framework designed to address this: Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR.
EPR makes companies financially or operationally responsible for what happens to their products after consumers are finished with them. The United Nations Environment Programme describes the approach as a way of shifting the burden of end-of-life management away from municipalities and taxpayers and toward the producers that place products on the market.
This is not a radical idea. It is basic accounting. If a company earns revenue by placing 100,000 tons of packaging into a market, then financing a system capable of recovering that material should be part of the cost of doing business there.
Virgin material should not enjoy an artificial economic advantage because the cost of recovering yesterday’s plastic has been assigned to someone else.
A serious producer-responsibility system would change that price signal. Companies placing large volumes of material on the market or using packaging that is difficult or expensive to recover would face more of the downstream costs their products create. Money now spent by municipalities, taxpayers and nonprofit organizations managing the consequences would instead become part of the economics of putting the material on the market in the first place.
Then virgin plastic would have to compete with recycled plastic on more honest terms.
For decades, we have asked consumers to recycle more carefully while permitting producers to manufacture new plastic without equivalent responsibility for recovering what they have already sold.
The fundamental question is not whether PET can be recycled. We already know that it can.
Nor is the question whether recycled PET can function at industrial scale. Some of the largest apparel companies in the world have already demonstrated that it can.
The harder question is why we have subsidized virgin PET by shifting much of its end-of-life cost onto taxpayers, municipalities and communities—allowing it to remain the cheaper choice when the scale of the plastic pollution crisis should be pushing companies toward recycled PET instead.
We have allowed a system to take shape in which extraction is centralized, standardized and profitable, while recovery is fragmented, local and frequently financed by the public. Until we correct that imbalance, many companies will continue making the economically rational choice to use cheaper virgin PET in their products—even when the collective result is irrational: more new plastic, while old plastic piles up around us. That is not primarily a failure of recycling technology. It is a failure of accounting—and of policy.