When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means.
When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means.
Companies whose futures depend on plastic production are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on plastic shopping bags and other items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.
Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag?
They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags.
But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.
Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.
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Recycling the original greenwashing
Plastic recycling, definitely. Aluminum/aluminum recycling is very effective. Approximately 75% of aluminum that has ever been mined and processed is still in use, and it can be re-used and recycled a functionally infinite number of times. But you're totally right about greenwashing in plastics. Even the easiest plastics to "recycle" (like PET or PETE) can only be reprocessed once or twice before the polymers break down too much for re-use.
The famous ad with the Native American crying about litter? It was literally funded by the single use plastic industry to shift the blame from them producing trash to people not throwing things away. Also, the guy was Italian.
And yet, it works in that sense. Whatever we’ve done with recycling, bottle deposits, and shaming people has made a real improvement in litter.
Now we just need to finish getting rid of glass bottles and cigarettes. And we have a win, at least in the context of litter
Litter wasn’t the problem. It was producing a persistent single use product that has to go somewhere. A landfill is only mildly better than on the side of the road.
Glass bottles, which are far more reusable and recyclable, would be better, not worse.