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| https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled |
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2639 - The Myth of Plastics Recycling
If you are a regular reader or a friend or both, you know we moved to Kalama two months ago.
Kalama does not have curbside recycling, and Kalama does not recycle plastic.
The bins at my school for collecting plastic recycling are a lie.
LIES.
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| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-oil-sold-world-plastics-153434428.html |
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| https://whatcomwatch.org/index.php/article/plastic-recycling-the-long-con/ |
https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/05/07/0348254/is-plastic-recycling-a-myth
Is Plastic Recycling a Myth? (nasdaq.com)
And meanwhile, "The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021, as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday."The report by environmental groups Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics shows the recycling rate has dropped from 8.7% in 2018, the last time the Environmental Protection Agency published recycling figures. The decline coincides with a sharp drop in plastic waste exports, which had counted as recycled plastic.... "The U.S. must take responsibility for managing its own plastic waste," said the report, which used 2018 EPA, 2021 export and recent industry data to estimate the 2021 recycling rate.....
"Recycling does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that," said report author Judith Enck [a former regional administrator at America's Environmental Protection Agency].
One sustainability site now even calls plastic recycling "a diversionary tactic preventing us from finding real solutions to our waste crisis," agreeing that it's being pushed by the plastics industry in "a clever, yet green-washed, ploy to maintain production by perpetuating a myth that all this plastic is destroyed. The sad truth is that it's not...."
"[T]he real problem is the ever-increasing amount of STUFF, particularly single-use plastic stuff, that's produced, consumed briefly, and then added to existing colossal piles of trash. Recycling can't solve this problem."
Or, as Cory Doctorow put it recently, "Recycling is puffery. Which is to say, recyling is bullshit...."In 1973, Exxon researchers told the company that there was no feasible way to recycle plastics, and that there likely never would be. Exxon sprang into action! They created a puffery campaign! They lobbied state legislatures to mandate the use of the recycling logo, three arrows pointing at each other, telling us that plastic was part of a new, "circular" economy. Oil is made into plastic, plastic is used, plastic is recycled. Everybody wins!
We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link...
 https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/plastic-problem-recycling-myth-big-oil-950957/   It’s a fairly well-documented fact that, at the most, only 25% of recyclable plastic in the US is actually designated for the recycling process. (This is not the same thing as saying that a quarter of the plastic actually gets recycled, but we’ll get to that one later.) The one thing you can be sure of, however, is that the little triangular symbol you see on plastic items – the “chasing arrows” device – means that it is recyclable, if only we as a society had the will to make it so. Right? Actually, no. The chasing arrows symbol is totally meaningless. The only item of real information contained in the mark is the number inside the arrows, and that is only an indication of the general classification of the resin that was used to make the item. Type 1, for example, is PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate). These are the beverage bottles, the rope and the prescription bottles. These are among the most commonly recycled plastics. Type 2 is HDPE (High-Density Polyethylene) and it is fairly often recycled as well. These are the milk jugs and the shampoo bottles, stuff like that. Then there’s type 3, PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride). And Type 4, LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene), your single-use grocery bags, squeezable bottles, etc. Type 5 is PP (Polypropylene) and Type 6 is PS (Polystyrene), what we commonly refer to as Styrofoam. Last comes Type 7, the miscellaneous class of plastics, ones that don’t use quite the same formulas as the others. Things like CD’s and medical storage containers would find themselves in here. None of these classes, Type 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7, are recycled. The problem is that with some of them, recycling is simply not possible; with others, it’s just not cost-effective. (There are some places where Type 4 or Type 6 are being recycled, but not many… it seems unlikely that it will catch on.) So there’s today’s myth. Just because your piece of plastic might be in the 25% that finds its way into a recycle bin, don’t think that means it is going to make another round. More than likely, it won’t.  |
| https://www.ecowatch.com/plastic-recycling-myth-2647706452.html |
The plastic recycling model was never economically viable, but oil and gas companies still touted it as a magic solution to waste, selling the American public a lie so the companies could keep pushing new plastic.
“The bottle may look empty, yet it’s anything but trash,” claims a 1990 ad showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck, Houston Public Media reported. It’s full of potential.… We’ve pioneered the country’s largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles.”
While the ad and countless others like it extolling the value of recycling sound environmentalist in nature, they were paid for by the plastics industry and their lobbying and trade organizations, the news report added.
Americans believed these ads and have been recycling plastic for decades, trusting the discards would be kept out of burgeoning landfills and oceans and reborn as new goods. The reality, however, is that most plastic can’t and won’t be recycled, reported NPR. According to the EPA, in the last 40 years, less than 10% of plastic has been recycled.
Up until 2018, most recyclable plastic was shipped to China to deal with, reported Forbes. When the latter banned imports of 24 kinds of waste, including plastic from the U.S., more plastic ended up in U.S. landfills, the news report said. In 2017, 35,370 tons of plastic were produced and 26,820 tons of that was landfilled, the EPA estimated, reported Forbes.
A series of investigative reports done by NPR and the PBS series Frontline this year found that the oil and gas industries — the makers of plastic — knew all along that plastic recycling would never be realistically feasible on a large scale, yet they spent tens of millions of advertising dollars each year telling the public that plastic can and should be recycled.
Internal documents from the 1970s and former executives confirmed that the industry knew all along that recycling at a large scale would never be economically viable because the process costs more than making new plastic, NPR reported.
Larry Thomas, who led the industry’s lobbying group for more than a decade, broke his silence about what happened decades ago. The plastic industry never wanted recycling to work, because recycling was in direct competition with their business of selling as much oil as they possibly could, Houston Public Media reported.
“You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Thomas told the news report.
Nevertheless, starting in the late 1980s, the industry misled consumers into believing that recycling could be a magic panacea. Spending million a year, big oil and plastic ran ads, installed collection centers and funded recycling projects and public regulation campaigns to convince the public that recycling works, NPR reported.
“Selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn’t true,” another former plastic executive told NPR.
Most of these projects never came to fruition before funding was cut, or have long since ended, reported Houston Public Media.
The industry also lobbied 40 states to put recycling symbols with numbers on all plastic, even if they weren’t recyclable, to bolster the public image that plastic can be a renewable resource, the news report found.
“It’s pure manipulation of the consumer,” Coy Smith, a frustrated recycler out of San Diego, told Houston Public Media. He witnessed firsthand how the symbols caused consumers to think any plastic with the symbol was recyclable.
Again, lobbying groups and the plastics industry knew all this. A 1993 industry report said that the codes created “unrealistic expectations” about how much plastic can actually be recycled and were being misused by companies as a “green marketing tool,” Houston Public Media reported.
When plastic bans started to pop up in the ’80s and ’90s, the industry similarly promoted recycling as an alternative to the bans, NPR reported. The industry again decided to “advertise [its] way out” of cultural and policy shifts that could potentially lead to falling sales of new plastic, NPR reported.
“The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire, we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products,” Thomas told NPR. “If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment.”
The strategy worked, and the companies promoted recycling while selling billions of dollars worth of new plastic. Meanwhile, old plastic continued to get trashed.
In response to the investigation, industry representative Steve Russell said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled, Forbes reported. Still, according to the news report, the oil industry makes 0 billion a year producing plastic and is discussing how to increase investment in plastic production given that demand for oil for cars is down.
As the truth about recycling comes out, states and environmentalists struggle to see if the broken system can be fixed at all. While they do that, plastic production is predicted to triple by 2050, NPR reported, and, “once again, the industry is spending money on ads and public relations to promote plastics and recycling.”
- U.S. Products Labeled Recyclable Really Aren't, Greenpeace ...
- The Recycling Dilemma: Good Plastic, Bad plastic? - EcoWatch
- The Complex and Frustrating Reality of Recycling Plastic - EcoWatch
- The Plastic Myth and the Misunderstood Triangle
- Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé Are Worst Plastic Polluters of 2020, Have Made 'Zero Progress,' New Report Finds - EcoWatch
- John Oliver Takes on the Plastics Industry
- The Recycling Industry in America Is Broken
- Who’s Making — and Funding — the World’s Plastic Trash?
- Can We Fix Recycling? Some Companies Are Trying
- California Just Passed 5 Mega Laws to Fight the Plastic Crisis - EcoWatch
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2205.10 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2503 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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