Every week, the small plastic bag filled with our collected plastic and metal tidbits—a partial fossil record of the consuming habits two American adults—hits the curb beside the cardboard. In my neighborhood, collection takes place at night to alleviate traffic and ostensibly tamp down crime. It hasn’t prevented anyone from stealing my recycling bin, but at least most of the refuse is gone in the morning, never to be seen again. I imagine it streaming down a conveyor belt at the recycling facility, getting a quick sort with human hands to separate out the metal, then to a giant crusher where its packed for shipping to the post-processing facility.

Unfortunately, my efforts to guide the future of anything stamped with an “arrow triangle” often comes to naught. Plastics, for the most part, don’t recycle well. Constructed as they are from long chains of large polymer molecules, are the red-headed stepchild of recycling efforts. Paper? No problem, just re-pulp. Metal and glass? Add heat. Plastic? Forget it. Big molecules are harder to mix, and melting the stuff causes it to separate into various material phases that are difficult to use.

Most plastic is simply sorted by type, heated to remove impurities and processed as pellets for limited uses (plastic lumber anyone?). Polyolefin materials (HDPE, LDPE, PP) are the best because they are less expensive to reprocess, but chemists are starting to getting a handle on much more difficult types such as PVC. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is, of course, the big culprit for waste, and often the best solution is to simply shred it and find a way to place it into the biggest product stream for PET: fabrics. Clothing made from old PET soda bottles is not so unusual anymore.

That’s not to say plastic isn’t great. It saves effort, time, and untold quantities of paper, wood, and glass. But too much PET is still making its way into landfills, especially after the last recession made an early victim of the recycled plastic market. Recycling programs—while invaluable in keeping plastic out of the conventional waste stream and off the roadside—fool the public into thinking plastic is a zero-sum consumer product. It isn’t. A one-liter bottle of water requires several mega-Joules of energy to manufacture, not to mention three times its volume in water.

One interesting solution is to burn it. Unlike many other plastics, PET is mostly composed of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Containing the energy equivalent of soft coal it’s probably no worse to burn if done with the proper environmental checks. A stopgap solution at best, I suppose. Plant-based plastics will probably be the future of the industry, and if researchers are successful, we may be able to extend the life of PET and other plastics indefinitely.

For now, plastics manufacturers can help out by improving the labeling system. That familiar “arrow triangle” with the tiny number is well-nigh useless to the general public. If I knew which plastics would go straight to the trash mountain, I could save everyone some time by pre-sorting it.