Five myths about recycling plastic that we hear at trade shows

We do four or five trade shows a year — mostly food/beverage and small chemical distribution. We hear the same five myths every time. Sharing because if you've heard them too, here's the version with our real-world data.

Myth 1: "Most plastic doesn't actually get recycled." True for consumer post-consumer plastic. Less true for industrial. HDPE in our specific category — 275-gal tote bottles — has a domestic recycling rate above 70%, because the material is high-volume, high-purity, and easy to identify. Consumer mixed plastic is genuinely a mess; industrial single-resin plastic mostly works.

Myth 2: "Reusing is always better than recycling." Mostly true, but with caveats. Reusing avoids manufacturing emissions; recycling captures most but not all of the material value. For our totes, reuse beats recycling by about 8x in carbon terms. But there's a point where a bottle is genuinely degraded and reuse becomes worse than recycling — that's what the 6% scrap rate represents.

Myth 3: "Recycled plastic is always lower quality than virgin." True for some applications, false for others. HDPE pellet from a single-resin source (like our totes) can replace virgin HDPE in many applications without quality loss. For new IBC bottles, regrind is typically blended at 20-30% with virgin to maintain mechanical specs. For drainage pipe and irrigation, 100% regrind is standard.

Myth 4: "Buying recycled is more expensive." True for some categories, false for IBC totes. Reconditioned tote pricing is about a third of new — the only category we know of where recycled/reused material beats new on price by that margin.

Myth 5: "If I recycle it, it's somebody else's problem." This is the one we push back on hardest. Recycling without traceability often means ocean-plastic pollution, contaminated regrind, or export to countries with no actual recycling infrastructure. The Reclaim Pledge exists because we got tired of seeing this in our industry.

The honest answer is that plastic is a complicated material and the systems for managing it are still maturing. Reusing the same bottle for years is the simplest and best thing. Recycling is the second-best. Throwing out is the worst. We try to make the first option as easy as possible.