As good citizens, we diligently fill the recycling bins provided by our local authorities with all manner of plastic trays, boxes, bottles and bags. But as these bins fill up quicker and quicker each week, an awkward question arises: is all this effort actually doing any good?

Many of us would answer with a sceptically resigned “of course not”. The facts unfortunately support this increasingly common view. In Europe, only around 15% of plastics are recycled, while in the United States the figure drops to 9%. The remainder ends up in incinerators, landfills or, in the worst of cases, in the natural environment.

The question we must answer is therefore not whether plastic recycling has issues, but why the system we have all trusted for decades is failing so catastrophically.

To understand what’s going wrong, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at how we actually use plastic. Around half of all plastics are used for single-use products: containers, packaging, bags, agricultural sheeting and so on.

Between 20% and 25% are used in long-term applications – pipes, cables, building materials – and the rest is used in consumer goods with an intermediate lifespan, such as vehicles, furniture and electronic devices.

In the EU, post-consumer plastic waste already reached 24.6...

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