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Contrary to what you’ve been told, this is and has always been the reality behind plastic “recycling.”
To misquote Buckminster Fuller, industry kills what industry touches. (He said that about tourism, but it works.) Industry decided to reach out and touch plastic recycling in the 1970s, about the time the general public was awakening to environmental concerns. At the same time, the same industry (Big Oil) reached out and touched global warming, launching what has to be the largest and most consequential deliberate scam of all — I’m assuming this, but I feel safe — climate-change denial.
But the oil companies used different strategies for the two issues. With climate change, they saw no upside, nothing to co-opt, and spent billions of dollars over many decades to spawn fake science, fake news and fake advertising denying that any such thing was happening, and if it was it was not especially harmful, and if it was there was nothing we could do about it anyway. But in plastic, they saw an opportunity for increased profits in the rising public disgust over the degradation of the planet with plastic waste.
Recycling, increasingly being demanded by the public, was from the point of view of profits, a non starter. The plastic tycoons knew it in 1974, when one industry captain said in a speech for insiders, “There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis.”
Here’s the economic reality: Collecting, transporting, sorting, cleaning and otherwise preparing used plastic for recycling is labor intensive, and therefore, especially in the United States, enormously expensive. Plastic degrades with age and reuse, and can be recycled no more than twice. By contrast, using virgin plastic is dirt cheap and far easier. So why would any industry start promoting a complicated, money-losing process?
Here’ the industrial logic: People who saw plastic waste accumulating in landfills, rivers, oceans and city streets would, in disgust, restrict their use of plastic. Politicians, responding to public emotion, would ban the use of plastics. The degree to which both these things were happening by the 1980s had the industry in a near panic. Counterintuitively, the industry began spending big money to promote recycling: not because they thought it would ever be viable, but because they thought a public that believed recycling was successful would continue to buy plastic products.
From then on, the industry spent $50 million a year promoting recycling, a money-losing proposition. In all that time, the amount of plastic actually recycled never reached ten percent a year of the plastic discarded. Yet in that same time period, they raked in $400 billion a year for products made with virgin plastic. Current estimates are that it will triple by 2050.
Industry abhors a loss, so it should come as no surprise that despite the fabulous profits enabled, in good measure, by the recycling con, there was lots of heartburn about the money being frittered away on pretending to recycle. Industry has just one solution for any problem — including debt — and that is: scale it up! And outsource it!
Before long there was a national network of industrial recycling sheds where enormous compactors churned out bales of discarded plastic that were trucked by diesel-gulping 18-wheelers to ports where they were loaded on cargo ships and transported halfway around the world to processing facilities whose employees made a dollar a day instead of $10 an hour. Soon 70 percent of the plastics collected for recycling in the US and 95 percent in the European Union were being shipped to Chinese processors.
But let’s face it, we Americans, and just about everybody else around the world, are slobs about our garbage. I mean recycling. We don’t sort it, we don’t clean it, we don’t refrain from throwing old batteries and pharmaceuticals and roadkill into it, and what we send to the recyclers — what we ended up sending to China — was an unholy mess. Even at a dollar a day for labor, it was too expensive to clean the plastic enough to recycle it and in the spring of 2018 China shut the whole deal down.
Since then the reality is that the overwhelming majority of all plastic discarded around the world is going into landfills, incinerators, waterways and the ocean. Just like before. Just like always.
Introduction of throwaway plastic packaging was a deliberate corporate strategy in the U.S. beginning in the 1950s. This is the best overview I’ve come across —
https://discardstudies.com/2014/07/09/modern-waste-is-an-economic-strategy/
— which cites the infamous 1963 speech by Modern Packaging Magazine editor Lloyd Stouffer.
re: “China shut the whole deal down.”
For a long time now, outside of weapons of mass destruction, America’s number one export has been waste, and for the last couple of decades, almost all of that waste was being dumped on … oops, my bad! … traded to China.
But then for no good reason, in 2018, China up and says, “No thanks, we are no longer going to accept your garbage. Keep it or send somewhere else, but don’t ship it here.”
So is it a Conspiracy Theory to suggest that the real reason the US believes it has been long hoodwinked, and much to its surprise, finds itself in an on-going “trade war” with China that it didn’t know about, is now that China is no longer willing to trade its manufactured goods to America for American waste, US “officialdom” is doing a quick re-think on this suddenly unfair trading relationship?
This “trade war” did seem to come straight out-of-the-blue, did it not? One minute everything is honky dory, and US “officials” are walking China through the process of creating all sorts “mutually beneficial” trade arrangements, like explaining to China how to peg the yuan to the dollar at 60 to 100, while at the same time teaching them how to do it for as long as it takes; which will enable China, on its end, to rapidly steal off America’s manufacturing base, while on the American end, it will give those who matter in America the needed impetus to crush the US labor force once for all, to hush the impudent voices of its leftists (none), its centrists (some), its wishy washy center-rightests ( the vast majority), while most importantly, it will all but assure the final elimination of the American middle-class can be carried out in full.
A trade relationship doesn’t get better than that. Or so it seemed.
But the next minute, it is announced that China is a slick and hostile trade manipulator. Whaaat? And whether it was us who taught them all the tricks, or at the very minimum, turned an encouraging eye at all the bi-lateral trade manipulation and trickery, is irrelevant, China is, and has been … CHEATING!
Giggle. I know it wasn’t just Trump who started the “trade war.” Hell, weren’t 15 of his 16 original Cabinet appointments post Goldman Sachs pro-China trade execs? Something like that.
Waste. Toxic waste. Who wants it? Who wants it dumped on them? Especially when they have a choice. Nobody.
Certainly not today’s China. China has grown up. In fact, to throw out another Conspiracy Theory, just for the helluva it, I believe modern China is so sophisticated, and so tricky, it is secretly planning on dumping its waste on America in the very near future, and it will all be part of what it considers, a fair trade arrangement.
The consumer-product corporations are big fans of “recycling”, because local governments and the public pick up the tab. Externalizing costs is key to their profitability. As long as China was taking in the plastic waste, the U.S. didn’t have to think much about what to do with it. Now that China is no longer buying it, the plastic is piling up fast. Actually, Chinese are still buying plastic, but they’re a lot more picky, according to the wife of a co-worker, who works for a county recycling agency here in Maryland.
It has bothered me for 20 years that my neighbors can’t see how foolish the idea of recycling is. If it reduced new packaging production and was cheaper then we might have something viable. But we don’t. We pay tax money for a recycler to haul it to the garbage to steam plant which is where our municipal waste goes. They have reduced the pickups to monthly and quit taking glass. Any conceivable recycled ‘products’ are more expensive with less quality. My wife thinks it’s good to pay more for shoddier goods if they are recycled. Picking up trash and doing something with it is uneconomic. It’s high touch–low return. It could be taxed at the source but then government would just prefer to have more trash……I have called the recycling center to ask what they are doing with the recycling since China quit taking it. They told me they sort it and send it to different cities. Where do they do that I ask? At the recycling center–a building with numerous large trash cans usually full to overflowing. I have only seen private citizens there dumping in their paper, glass, cardboard, and cans. After driving there.
But I have followed the truck that picks up my recycling and it goes to the garbage to steam plant, the same place as my household waste including leaves and yard waste. When I tell people the city lies about its recycling and it does not help the environment, they think it’s just good to have a recycling program for the useful things. But there is no useful output and it costs resources to do it. Just like TSA security theater at the airport; Useless wasteful activity.
Right. In our culture it is far more important to SEEM to be doing something good than actually to do something good. Because, you know, its hard.
Billy Crystal said it best .
It’s better to look good than to feel good.
evelkidnievel
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143K views
8 years ago
“You look marvelous!”