I heard that recycling is broken. Why do we recycle things if it doesn’t work?

Firstly, recycling works when Buoy does it with HDPE (#2). So recycling isn’t broken. Recycling also works with PET (#1).  It’s a bit expensive for Polypropylene (#4), but people are starting to do it more. There are good schemes for LDPE (#4) and polystyrene (#6). PVC (#3) recycling is not so common from consumers, but it’s definitely done industrially. I think we as consumers saw the recycling signs and thought that it was magically going off to China and coming back as an iPhone and when we were told that was wrong, it hurt our feelings and now we’re mad at recycling. Except that doesn’t make sense. If someone invites you for dinner and they serve it three hours after they said they would, you don’t get mad at the concept of dinner. So don’t be mad at recycling or recyclers. Nature recycles everything and we need to get over our hurt feelings and dig in on the side of actively following the lead of nature by recycling and reusing. 

Making things out of (and buying things made of) recycled plastic, whether Ocean bound or not, is good, because you are taking something that exists in the world, the plastic item, and making something new out of it without using virgin materials. Every time we make something out of raw materials, whether those raw materials are oil or wood or sand or ores or clay or bamboo or kelp, there are environmental and human costs: pollution from the mining or extraction, the use of food-producing land for something that’s not food, pollution from the growing and refining, carbon production from the energy required throughout the extraction/agriculture/production chain and water use in the case of compostables. Thanks to its very low melting point, taking existing plastic, mechanically recycling it and then molding it into something new is pretty near the lowest carbon activity you can do to make anything in an industrial context. Whittling still beats everything.