A manufacturer can claim to be using “recycled” plastic by using even a fraction of a percent of recycled materials, and even if these are “recycled” from leftover sprue that was never incorporated into manufactured products.
The polyethylene terephthalate (PET) used in beverage bottles, among many other applications, will break down by both exposure to ultraviolet radiation and hydrolysis (reaction with water). If you’ve ever handled old discarded plastic water or soda bottles this is evident as they are brittle and tear easily. When people say that “plastic lasts forever in the environment”, they do not mean that products make from polymers will retain their original properties or mechanical integrity ‘forever’ (which should be obviously not true to anyone who has seen plastic patio furniture after it has set out in the weather for a few years) but that the residues of the decayed polymer will remain in the water and soil for millennia.
And the same applies whenever someone brings up one of the handful of bacteria that break down plastics; yes, there are bacteria (and fungi) that produce specific enzymes that can break down certain polymers but they don’t reduce them to basic elements or simple organic molecules; they just reduce them to shorter chain polymers and monomers that are actually more biologically available than the original intact polymer.
By the way, aluminum and non-stainless steel containers are also lined with polymer liners to prevent them from reacting to the metals, so just using all metal containers is not a solution to prevent the leaching of polymer components Plastic in a fundamental material in our food, medical, and packaging infrastructure and there is nothing that can really replace it, but it comes with significant concerns with the environmental residues it produces.
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