Recycling isn’t going to solve our waste problems. Between the contamination that happens when we don’t recycle correctly and the degradation of plastic over time, it’s a band-aid at best, and millions of pounds of “recyclable” materials end up in landfills no matter which bin we put them in. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should just accept plastic pollution (including the micro plastics that litter the oceans and our own bodies) as a fact of life. But it does mean we have to change our approach.

Recyclability Doesn’t Matter Anymore

According to the most recent EPA stats available (which are from 2015), the amount of plastic waste generated in the United States is actually rising. Up to 70% of plastic entering recycling facilities around the world is unusable, and some of it – like plastic bags – gums up the machines, ruining entire loads of potentially recyclable materials.

If you’re wondering where our plastic goes when it doesn’t get recycled, a recent Guardian report from 11 countries tracked how waste from the U.S. makes its way around the world. Hundreds of thousands of tons of it, from plastic bottles to e-waste, are shipped every year to impoverished countries like Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal in what is essentially a new form of colonization.

We don’t know how to deal with it, so we put it all on ships and send it “away,” where it becomes someone else’s problem, spilling out into their own natural spaces. The toxic fumes that can result from burning or processing plastics contain substances like dioxins, heavy metals and hydrochloric acid.

It’s easy to blame all of this on consumers not taking the time to properly sort recyclables. But the recyclability of plastics can be arcane even to people who are well-educated on the topic, since facilities vary in the types of plastic they’re able to take, and the numbers printed on containers within that meaningless mobius loop recycling symbol don’t necessarily tell us whether they’re accepted by local waste processors.

Planning for a Circular Economy

The solution to all of this is actually pretty simple. The manufacturers who produce products, packaging and even architecture in the first place should have their own plans and systems to take it back when its usefulness to the consumer has ended. Moving toward a circular economy with a closed-loop system would place the responsibility for the waste produced by a given object in the hands of its manufacturer, driving motivation to come up with less wasteful solutions in the first place.

There’s no shortage of innovation when it comes to plastic alternatives that aren’t made of fossils fuels. Among the solutions that have already been proposed are edible seaweed-based materials, bioplastics made of arthropod shells, biodegradable combinations of cellulose and natural resins, mushroom-based foam and more. Some of them, like Sulapac, can be produced on existing production lines, so if companies really wanted to, they could instantly switch from their current plastic materials to a sustainable alternative.

But biodegradable plastics can pose problems of their own. While we might imagine that disposable tableware marked “compostable” is better than plastic or styrofoam, it can still end up in the ocean, where it takes years to break down and can potentially endanger wildlife. It also has to be sent to special industrial composting facilities, which don’t exist in every area. The thing is, with the possible exception of edible or plant-based options like banana leaves, few of these biodegradable innovations actually help if they’re still being used to produce single-use disposable items.

Individual actions still matter, and a big piece of the puzzle is changing our own thinking around convenience and the value of durability, but ultimately, like with climate change, we can’t let corporations off the hook. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988, and 20 companies represent the world’s biggest plastic polluters, including energy companies, beverage behemoths and meat and dairy processors. They have the money and the power to dramatically reduce pollution of all kinds.

Few companies are going to take the initiative to do this until we reach a critical mass of consumer demand, putting pressure on corporations to take responsibility and following up with legislative action. In a time when we’re dealing with so many pressing crises at once, it might be difficult to imagine pulling that off, but at the risk of sounding trite, changing anything for the better starts with imagining the world we want to live in and working from there.

Top image: Mi Zhou’s soapack, which uses soap as zero-waste packaging for shampoo and other liquid toiletries.

A material once seen as a breakthrough innovation that could benefit the environment by replacing animal products now litters the Earth to the tune of approximately 6.3 billion metric tons, most of it in the world’s oceans. Forty percent of that plastic is single-use packaging.

While recycling might seem like the most obvious way to deal with the problem, the fact is, less than a fifth of all plastic is recycled globally – and even once it’s recycled, plastic typically just degrades into smaller pieces that are harder than ever to clean up. The smallest particles discovered in new research measure about the width of a human hair, small enough to penetrate membranes in the gut and bloodstream. We still don’t know what effects these contaminants have on our health, but it’s clear that they’re harming and killing marine life and other animals that accidentally consume them.

In a world accustomed to convenience and disposability, scaling back the use of plastics seems virtually impossible. That’s why the key to finding a way out of this mess might lie with products that function a lot like plastic, but behave entirely differently when their life cycle meets an end, whether they’re used for beverages or buildings.

Edible Options

Single-use plastics are manufactured for a fleeting purpose, maybe an hour or two protecting your beverage from spills or a few moments of swabbing cotton over your skin. A lot of these items are used for hygienic reasons – like a pair of disposable gloves or the packaging that keeps certain items clean as they’re shipped and displayed on store shelves. Most of them can’t be recycled at existing facilities. But what if they were able to serve the purpose they’re made for, and then practically disappear before our eyes? A host of promising new plastic alternatives made of organic materials are able to do just that.

Plentiful and sometimes even edible, seaweed might just become the packaging of choice for food and beverage uses, cosmetics and other applications. It’s cheap, easy to harvest and doesn’t require fresh water or fertilizer to grow, and can biodegrade in soil in less than six weeks. Seaweed beds are also natural carbon sinks, de-acidifying water. Different varieties of seaweed have different properties that make them ideal for one purpose or another, like flexible red seaweed for disposable plates and cups or agar for clear, jelly-like edible pouches.

Biocompatible Materials for Medical Applications

Some bioplastics might even have a future in hospitals for tissue engineering or suturing wounds. A material called “Shrilk” comes from the wings and outer skeletons of arthropods like crustaceans, spiders, beetles and caterpillars, which are made up of protein and a polysaccharide polymer called chitin arranged in a plywood-like structure. It’s translucent, resilient, pliable and strong. Shrilk could be used to create everything from garbage bags, diapers and packaging to scaffolds for tissue regeneration or growing organs for transplants in laboratories.

Other forms of bioplastics made from chitin can be mixed with cellulose from wood or cotton to create environmentally friendly barrier coatings for food, water-resistant paper, ceiling tiles and wallboards. No living creatures have to be harmed to produce them, either, since insects naturally shed their exoskeletons and humans produce mountains of discarded lobster, crab and shrimp shells after consuming them.

The University of Bath found that biodegradable plastics can be made using sugar and carbon dioxide, too, and it’s cheap and easy to produce using low pressures and room temperature process. The resulting material is strong, transparent and scratch-resistant and can be biodegraded back into carbon dioxide and sugar using enzymes from soil bacteria. Like plastics made from chitin, this bioplastic is bio-compatible and can safely be used for tissue engineering.

Made of tiny plant fibers, nanocellulose is also technically edible – though it probably doesn’t taste all that great. Sourced either from forestry or agricultural waste products, it’s stronger than steel per weight and stronger than the Kevlar that’s used in bulletproof vests since the fibers stick together into small, solid structures. When it’s broken down into nanocrystals with the help of strong acids, it can be made transparent and applied to surfaces to smooth and strengthen them, creating a better oxygen barrier than plastic. It’s especially well-suited to flexible electronic components, bone regeneration and wound healing.

Organic Materials in Plant-Based Binders

One of the biggest concerns about replacing plastic is the fact that it’s currently so cheap to produce. Can any other material quickly step in and take its place using the same manufacturing equipment? It turns out, the answer to that question is yes. Sulapac is a material made from FSC-certified wood and natural binders, and it has plastic-like properties while being totally biodegradable and leaving no micro plastics behind. Sulapac products are water-, oil- and oxygen-resistant and can be produced on most existing production lines, so companies can instantly switch from their current plastic materials to a sustainable alternative.

Even cow’s milk can be made into a sort of plastic. Casein plastic, made of milk proteins, is so easy to make you can do it at home as a kid-friendly science project. In fact, milk was commonly used to make various plastic objects like buttons, beads and combs in the early 1900s. It readily takes surface dye, so it’s easy to mix into a wide variety of colors including pearlized and faux-tortoiseshell effects. After the advent of newer plastics, its use declined, but casein plastic could make a comeback. The vessels above were designed by Royal College of Art graduate Tessa Silva-Dawson for a project called “Protein.”

Molded Mycelium

Since pretty much nothing would ever biodegrade without the help of bacteria and fungi, it’s fitting to use the linked cells of mycelium as a replacement for materials that can’t be broken down naturally. Mycelium is the underground portion of fungi we see growing out of the soil, and it can be used to produce a surprisingly strong substrate that can be grown into molds of virtually any size and shape. The secret is in its tiny chains of tubular cells, binding together with natural materials like leaves and mulch to create dense mats.

A company called Evocative Design uses several species of fungi along with farming byproducts like seed hulls from rice and cotton gin waste to create a sort of styrofoam alternative that’s actually more UV-stable than foam and just as water-resistant. They break down within 180 days, whether in a landfill or somebody’s backyard.

Another biodegradable material called Mycoform is made from a composite of Ganoderma lucidum mushrooms, wood chips, oat bran, gypsum and other organic components. Also grown in molds, these networks of mycelia become strong enough to support significant weights, so they can be used to make furniture, insulation and interlocking walls for architecture. Some designers are even experimenting with ways to use them as a primary building material.

Considering that 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions and microplastics are actively endangering the entire food chain, refining biodegradable alternatives like these and producing them on a mass scale can’t happen soon enough.

Top image: Ooho edible water pouches made from agar

It’s not often that tourists line up to collect trash in the cities they’re visiting, and pay for the privilege, too. But in Amsterdam, ‘plastic fishing’ is a surprisingly popular way for outsiders to experience the city’s canals and give back at the same time. As awareness grows about the problem of plastic pollution, so does Plastic Whale’s list of customers. The organization provides two-hour tours in boats made of recycled plastic pulled from those same waterways, arming tourists with fishing nets and encouraging them to scoop up anything that doesn’t belong in the canals.

That detritus might include random items like wallets, keys, aluminum cans and candy wrappers, but it mostly consists of plastic – enough to provide Plastic Whale with a fleet of ten boats. The organization takes the trash to its facilities, sorts it and recycles it, with some of the plastic (and steel) becoming a range of high end office furniture in collaboration with manufacturer Vepa.

“Plastic Whale Circular Furniture is created following the full principles of circular production and design. So besides the recycled Amsterdam Canal plastic, we also make optimal use of other ‘waste streams’ at Vepa’s factory, including recycled steel for in our chairs and residual fabrics for the chair’s cushioning. Nothing goes to waste. At the end of its life cycle, we even take your product back from you. And pay you for it, because we’ll be using it as raw material in new products.”

Plastic Whale describes itself as a “social impact experience” where 100% of what tourists pay goes to their recycling goals. The canals get cleaner, new products get produced and visitors get a little more conscious about the impact of plastic on the environment while experiencing the city in a whole new way. Plastic Whale’s ultimate goal is to go out of business as less plastic appears in the canals in the first place.

The company books its weekend plastic fishing expeditions seasonally through Airbnb.

Images via Plastic Whale’s Facebook

A fresh new type of park-on-the-water in Rotterdam is turned plastic trash that once polluted the area into a series of hexagonal pods now open to the public. The design is built to scale, too — more units can be added as more waste is recovered.

The floating landscape is meant to raise awareness, but also provides a practical resting spot for people, as well as a refuge and breeding ground for snails, flatworms, beatles and fish — each pod has its on purpose, be it benches for humans or soil for plants and animals.

The artificial island chain was built by the Recycled Island Foundation, an organization that takes trash from the mouths of rivers using litter traps and reuses what they can. These traps are designed to catch and keep what passes by, even as the currents of the rivers change.

“When we retrieve the plastics directly in our cities and ports we actively prevent the further growth of the plastic soup in our seas and oceans. The realization of the building blocks in recycled plastics is an important step towards a litter free river.”

Standing nearly 40 feet tall, this giant arcing whale is composed entirely of plastic waste gathered from the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, carefully assembled in a canal of Bruges, Belgium.

Following a Liquid City theme, Brooklyn designers from STUDIOKCA chose the form to help observes visualize the magnitude and shape of both what winds up clogging the world’s oceans and the creatures impacted.

The net effect is striking, the arched water mammal rising up from the deep in a graceful curve, which, upon closer inspection, is made up of white and blue refuse, stamped with languages and brands from around the world.

Dubbed Skyscraper, the sculpture brings together 4,000 square feet of discarded plastic gathered in Hawaii beach cleanups, a small fraction of the 150 million tons currently lost at sea.

And while the majestic sea creature ricing from the canal might seem large, “pound for pound that is more plastic waste swimming in the ocean than there is whales,” say the creators. “So an opportunity like this to show the type of plastic and the amount of plastic that ends up in our oceans is really important.”