I am increasingly coming to wonder if the non-biodegradability of plastic should be regarded as a feature rather than a bug.
This stuff is made of oil. The last thing we want to do with oil, from an environmental standpoint, is turn it into greenhouse gases. The best way to accomplish that would be to leave it underground. Since we're not doing that, perhaps the second best thing is to convert it into a solid material and then put it back underground. It seems like landfills are our chance at keeping this stuff reasonably contained, and, in that setting, the fact that it lasts forever hopefully means that this carbon we dug up from underground won't end up in the atmosphere quite so quickly.
All other options seem to ultimately lead toward large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water pollution. Recycling seems to be, at best, a more scenic route to that same destination.
Because plastic producing companies have spent the last 40 years and a lot of money telling us that plastics are good "because they can be recycled" while not recycling and not addressing the very real problems caused by plastics because profit.
I don't know about "has become". I've known it to be the goal as far back as the 1980s. (Anything before then is before I started forming memories.)
I think it probably comes from the same place as organic food and suchlike: a conflation of "more natural" with "better for the environment." They're not necessarily the same thing, and we're finding increasingly many situations where doing things in a "more natural" way is actually pretty terrible for the earth's ecosystems when seven billion humans are trying to do it at a planetary scale.
If only we had a few orders of magnitude more trees, or some other way to turn the CO2 back into oil more quickly, that would be the ultimate recycling.
This stuff is made of oil. The last thing we want to do with oil, from an environmental standpoint, is turn it into greenhouse gases. The best way to accomplish that would be to leave it underground. Since we're not doing that, perhaps the second best thing is to convert it into a solid material and then put it back underground. It seems like landfills are our chance at keeping this stuff reasonably contained, and, in that setting, the fact that it lasts forever hopefully means that this carbon we dug up from underground won't end up in the atmosphere quite so quickly.
All other options seem to ultimately lead toward large-scale greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and water pollution. Recycling seems to be, at best, a more scenic route to that same destination.