Environment: "Plastic recycling is often just a good story"

One summer, Nathalie Gontard unpacks magazines that she has left piled up.

Suddenly, her throat stings, she has trouble breathing, her lungs seem on fire, she collapses.

Under the effect of the heat, the plastic disintegrated, invaded the room and reached his lungs.

The accident that occurred twenty years ago was a turning point for this plastics specialist.

It warns today about the false good solutions of recycling.

Companies communicate more and more on the recycled content in their products, is this reassuring?

NATHALIE GONTARD.

We continue to produce around 400 million tonnes of virgin plastic every year.

However, real recycling – that is to say producing an object similar to the original one – concerns less than 2% of plastic, plastic bottles made of PET.

If France has a recycling rate of around 32%, we should in fact speak of de-cycling, because on the one hand you always have to reinject virgin plastic, and on the other hand the new product is always of lower quality.

It will then continue to degrade at home, at landfills or in nature and will swell the reservoir of micro and nanoplastics.

Recycling plastic is often just a good story.

“What worries me is that, for the ecological transition in particular, we massively use plastic without questioning the impact”, explains Nathalie Gontard.

PhotoPQR/MaxPPP/Le Midi Libre

Isn't that already progress?

Many scientists are advancing on solutions, but efforts must above all focus on reducing plastic.

By setting up these “decycling” channels, plastic replaces materials that did not pose any problems.

Take wool, gradually discarded as there are more and more plastics in sweaters.

Look at Germany, Austria which “decycles” up to half of their plastic.

They should have halved their consumption, but this is far from the case.

It's actually a vicious cycle.

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What's wrong with plastic?

Plastic is an eternal pollutant — and we make it disposable!

—, it can pollute the oceans but also the land for centuries.

We can continue to use it but knowingly.

What worries me is that, for the ecological transition in particular, we massively use plastic without questioning the impact, under the pretext that we are fighting against global warming.

We must not get caught up in false solutions.

Thus, many of our used plastics go to be “processed” abroad.

Turkey, for example, recovers some of this waste.