Veronique Greenwood’s Dec. 4 Ideas piece, “Is there a future for plastic recycling?,” should be posing a different question.

Even if there were a magic wand and plastics could be turned into fairy dust, that wouldn’t change the fact that plastic is made with fossil fuels. According to the Center for International Environmental Law, more than 99 percent of plastic is made from chemicals sourced from fossil fuels. I think we can all agree that we need to be getting off of fossil fuels.

The world produces more than 400 million tons of plastic every year. As a reference, if the entire human population stepped on a scale, it would be less than that (a bit more than 300 million tons). And plastic production has been speedily increasing, according to the Plastic Soup Foundation. More than half the total amount of plastic produced was only brought to market after 2000. Production is expected to roughly quadruple by 2050.

We have been taught: Reduce, reuse, recycle. These waste solutions are listed in that order for a reason. In a world where the mass of all of our stuff now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet, the question we should be posing is: How can we reduce the use of plastics?

Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group

As Veronique Greenwood notes, plastics “are made of fossil fuels treated with softeners and other substances.”

In other words, they are entirely synthetic.

Of the more than 350,000 human-made chemicals and chemical mixtures approved for use in commerce, only a handful have been studied for safety in isolation let alone in combination with others, which is how we experience them.

New research is showing that plastic is anything but inert. In a study released in February, Danish scientists put ordinary tap water into typical sports water bottles and let it sit at room temperature for 24 hours. More than 400 chemicals, many toxic, leached into the water. After going through a dishwasher, the bottles leached more than 3,500 chemicals, some of which, including the insect repellent DEET, may have formed as a result of the dishwashing process.

Meanwhile, no chemicals migrated into water put into glass bottles as a control.

We have been poisoning ourselves and the entire planet through our use of plastic. Rather than identifying new chemistry to recycle it more effectively, we should put our energy into weaning ourselves off this toxic material.

Work at Boston Globe Media