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 classic mid-century roadside motel in Las Vegas has been turned into a fantastically colorful habitat for a series of huge animals, constructed from waste collected from dumpsters, abandoned factories and scrap yards.

This 10,000-square-foot zoo parody (dubbed ‘Wild Wild Waste’) by artist Bordalo II is his biggest installation to date. It’s designed to make statements about the commodification of animal habitats as well as human waste production and management activities.

“Bordalo is inspired by the rejected, the broken, the wasted, somehow our everyday,” explains the exhibit’s curator. “With the trash we refuse to be responsible for he creates a fantastic installation that is playful and, furthermore that question our relation to waste and our responsibility.”

The animals are simultaneously visible as a whole and a set of parts. A flock of penguins emerges from plastic cubes, car parts morph into a family of pandas, while a whale caught in a fishing net and lion caged in a truck further highlight ideas of confinement.

“We were so humbled to have the opportunity to help host the art of bordalo at life is beautiful this past weekend,” said one of the organizers. “The entire installation’s emotional nature gave us all a little lesson in doing more with less in our work and in our environment.”

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.”

In strikingly well-composed, vividly colored scenes resembling abstract paintings, J. Henry Fair’s aerial photographs of toxic waste and industrial activity on Earth give us an uncomfortable look at the cost of human progress. In fact, the images seem unreal: how could the damage caused by industrial pollution be so strangely beautiful? Tar sands, mountaintop removal mining, fertilizer runoff, coal ash, factory farming and devastating oil spills aren’t exactly the stuff that stunning art is usually made of, but Fair is no ordinary artist, forcing us to face the duality of what we’ve created.

Shooting these scenes from the air gives us a perspective we don’t normally have, as if we’re flying over them in person, reckoning with the damage that comes with our consumption of fossil fuels, large-scale farmed meat, chemicals and other commodities that do significant harm to the environment in their sourcing and manufacturing.

Coal combustion waste may not be pretty, but its splashes of rust and bronze against its black and white surroundings are undeniably striking. Some heavy metals, like ‘red mud’ bauxite waste from aluminum production, are almost floral in their contrast to green.  Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is mesmerizing in its flowing red ribbons against the cobalt blue of the Gulf of Mexico waters. Phospho-gypsum fertilizer waste is a brilliant blue-green, like a gemstone; it contains both uranium and radium, piled dangerously close to drinking water aquifers.

“What interests me about this series is its essential irony and hope,” he says. “The thinking person participating in the modern world understands that all of us are living unsustainably, the impending consequences on our economy are real and significant. But in fact, with a little effort and luck, these limitations could be overcome, ensuring a secure future. And so we must hope, as we are all invested. My goal is to produce beautiful images that stimulate an aesthetic response, and thus dialog. If the pictures are not beautiful, the viewer will not stop to consider them.”

These images and many more are available in the form of a hardcover book set to be released on July 6th, ‘Industrial Scars: The Hidden Costs of Consumption.’

Starting with name-brand versions of popular products found in virtually any home, this designer has come up with a series of clever solutions to eliminating the waste from each package system on a case-by-case basis.

Aaron Mickelson took on this challenge as a master’s thesis project at the Pratt Institute, asking (and answering) the question: can any product be truly garbage-free, leaving little or nothing unused in its wake? The strategies employed here are also potentially versatile – each could be applied to a type or category of packaging (and would-be trash).

The bag of garbage bags design for GLAD products is fairly straightforward, to the point where one has to wonder why they are not using this strategy already: the last bag contains the rest of the bags, both to make it functional as a bag itself but also to leave it as a reminder to buy more bags (which you can see coming thanks to it being partially transparent as well).

The laundry (or dish) pods for Tide are designed to dissolve in water, leaving nothing behind that you need to take out of the wash, obviating the need for a container entirely.

The OXO pop containers feature soap-soluble ink that breaks down when you wash it, taking the branding materials with it and leaving you with an all-purpose container. As a bonus: these could also come pre-loaded with food rather than simply sold as containers, too, allowing you to buy products then keep the plastic boxes for other uses.

The Nivea bar of soap comes in a septic-safe dissolving paper wrapper that you can bring into the shower or bath with you and not have to worry about throwing out, eliminating a step as well as reducing landfill.

Finally, this Twining tea bag variant eliminates the wax lining that typically prevents composting and instead integrates each tea packet directly into the compost-friendly packaging design that unfolds like an accordion for use.