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While images of shiny new recycled products dance in consumers’ dreams, this is where their plastic discards actually go.
Of all the subjects I have tackled in the 12 years or so I have been writing in this space, none has given me greater pain than recycling. I have many friends and family members who are passionate about recycling, and proud of their recycling creds. For me to write, as I often have, that recycling — especially plastics recycling — is basically an industry scam, hurts them, and hurts me. Some examples:
“The Second Biggest Scam Ever: Plastic Recycling.” The Daily Impact, November 2020.
“Recycling: Garbage In, Garbage Out.” The Daily Impact, June, 2019.
“Recycling and Rain Forests: Trojan Horses.” The Daily Impact, May, 2018.
Needless to say I have taken some grief for my opinions on this, but last week came powerful affirmation: the attorney general of California launched an investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries for their role in “causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis.”
As I have long maintained, and as the California AG now states, the plastic recycling movement was co-opted in the 1980s by the plastic manufacturers, aka Big Oil. Instead of resisting recycling and spreading misinformation about it — as they did for decades with respect to pollution from fossil fuel burning — this time they were smarter. They realized that if the public believed that plastics were being recycled, the public would continue to use them. If on the other hand they saw plastic trash piling up in landfills, waterways, and roads, they would restrict their use and agree to harsh controls.
An early and very successful PR exercise by the plastic industry was the invention of the “chasing arrows” symbol claiming to identify recyclable plastic. Millions and millions of dollars of advertising money “led to the current misunderstanding by a majority of Americans that any plastic bearing the symbol can be recycled,” in the words of the California AG. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“In reality, despite the industry’s decades-long recycling campaign, the vast majority of plastic products, by design, cannot be recycled and the U.S. plastic recycling rate has never broken 9 percent. The remaining 91 percent is landfilled, incinerated, or otherwise released into the environment,” the attorney general’s office said.
The situation in California is further complicated by the fight raging over a ballot initiative that will go before the state’s voters in November that seeks to impose on plastic manufacturers tha very Draconian controls they have been trying to avoid for all these decades. The initiative proposes to ban Styrofoam, put a fee on single-use plastic products and foodware, and require them to be made recyclable or compostable by 2030. Proceeds from the fee, estimated at several billion dollars per year, would go toward recycling infrastructure and environmental restoration.
Microplastics — tiny remnants of discarded plastic products — are now everywhere in the environment, in the oceans, in the food supply and in our bodies, including our blood and lung tissue. Between eight million and 14 million tonnes of plastic waste are dumped into the oceans every year. The garbage accumulates in ocean gyres — the one in the central Pacific is the size of Texas.
To all of which the industry continues to say, don’t worry, be happy — and recycle.
It breaks my heart how right you are Mr. Lewis. In it’s dark genius capitalism found uses for the by-products of refining the actual industrial fuels – bunker, diesel & jet – from crude. Asphalt and gasoline were first; sprawl pavement across the land and offer the ‘freedom’ of spending way to much time and treasure driving on it. Then came the plastics to use up some more of the light bits of the crude.
The by-products will be with us as long as we continue using the products, but we will be using less of them despite our lack of will; it appears we have started down the other side of Hubbert’s curve. Brace for…a long, uneven multi-generational tumble.
Yes.
Next up…. plastic clothing? Probably one of the biggest sources of microplastics in the oceans, via wastewater.
Read somewhere a long time back that in hundreds of millions of years when presumed archeologists (space aliens, funnily enough) piece together the dead Earth’s evolutionary and geological history that led to the great dying (a/k/a seventh and final mass extinction), one of the discoveries will be a sedimentary layer of plastic across the surface of the globe that never breaks down or is reabsorbed the way biological material is. That will be among the legacies of our so-called dark genius.
Hi Tom.
If it looks like a scam, smells like a scam, and screams like a scam, it probably is a scam.
My understanding of many of the varieties of plastics used (and there are a great number of them, and please correct me if I am wrong) is that many only have one or maybe two useful lives anyway. And products made from recycled plastics are viewed as inferior products in the public’s mind.
Glass, sad to say has similar issues.
Mate, I’ve taken the same cloth bags to markets and supermarkets for a quarter century, and when I was a kid this was the usual practice, and I’m not that old.
We have single use plastic ban rules down here, and um, sorry to say but what appears to have happened is that super markets now provide thicker plastic bags, but the shopper has to now pay for them. How clever is that response?
Anyway, sorry to be a buzzkill, but we’ll keep on doing this, until we can no longer keep on doing this.
Cheers
Chris
Capitalist corporations con consumers continuously
You won’t get any grief from me – plastics recycling is a con foisted on the public, and the petrochemical industry knows it. Now, it’s practically impossible to avoid plastic packaging.
This is the best summary I’ve come across of the plastics debacle:
https://discardstudies.com/2014/07/09/modern-waste-is-an-economic-strategy/
The eye-opener is the astounding speech by Modern Packaging Magazine editor Lloyd Stouffer at a 1963 chemical convention. There’s a link to it in the story.
It would be absolutely great if energy itself could be recycled. Our environmental and resource problems would probably be solved.
There’s only one problem. The laws of thermodynamics won’t allow that.
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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eMtLdE5Zq-8 ~~~