Facts about Plastics and the Environment that Every Physics Teacher Should Know

Recently, Greta Thunberg has strongly increased environmental awareness with the climate strikes and the resulting Fridays for Future movement. But what does environmentally friendly behavior look like? In today’s society, it is a sort of common sense that one should recycle. From an early age, we are taught in school that recycling conserves resources and energy. However, there are also skeptics of this “common sense.” In 2004, for example, Penn and Teller dedicated an episode of their TV show to recycling. According to them, “[Recycling] increases energy use in transport, sorting, storing, and cleaning …. it takes more energy to recycle a plastic bottle than to make a new one, and that’s not so good …. we’re feeling good for no reason.” We hope that when people start to question the validity of recycling that they will turn to their physical science teachers for help, and we hope that these teachers will be able to give an informed and educated answer. In this article, our goal is to provide physical science teachers with the information they need to defend the position that recycling plastic bottles is worthwhile, and to expose the myth that recycling plastic bottles is just “feeling good for no reason.” Although the primary intention of this paper is to supplement content knowledge of physical science teachers regarding sustainability, it will conclude with some instructional suggestions of how students can be guided through debunking on their own the myth that recycling plastic bottles causes more harm than good.