The Plastic Recycling Scam

 In the middle of the Pacific Ocean this young albatross died from the plastic trash in its stomach.                                                               Photo :Chris Jordan

In the late 1960s the leading companies in the plastics industry realized that as plastic packaging became more ubiquitous, plastic waste was going to become a public issue. As a defensive measure, they developed a campaign to ensure that the public would know who was responsible for any plastic trash laying about. It would be those litterbugs who simply couldn’t be bothered with the careful disposal of all that wonderful plastic. Enter the “Crying Indian.”

The shift from Keep America Beautiful’s bland admonishments about litter to the Crying Indian did not represent an embrace of ecological values but instead indicated industry’s fear of them. In the time leading up to the first Earth Day in 1970, environmental demonstrations across the United States focused on the issue of throwaway containers. All these protests held industry — not consumers — responsible for the proliferation of disposable items that depleted natural resources and created a solid waste crisis. Enter the Crying Indian, a new public relations effort that incorporated ecological values but deflected attention from beverage and packaging industry practices.

At first environment groups strongly supported the Keep America Beautiful campaign, but they quickly came to the realization that the founders of the campaign weren’t really interested in dealing with plastic waste .

...Although the “Indian” who tears up when he sees a bag of litter thrown on the ground was really an Italian-American actor with a feather stuck in his hair, the ad’s sneakier deception was that its expression of concern about pollution was brought to the airwaves by many of the same companies that produced the pollution. Even as their ad was inducing guilt in viewers for spreading trash, Keep America Beautiful’s members were fighting legislation that could have done much to address the problem.

The plastics industry includes fossil fuel companies that create the raw materials, chemical companies that produce the various products and a myriad of companies that flood every corner of the marketplace with a never-ending stream of single use plastic item. It's a multi-trillion dollar industry with deep pockets and no interest in slowing down the proliferation of plastics applications.

In 1967, when Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” was being advised to go into plastics, less than 25 million tons were produced each year. Even back then, the companies that made the plastic were already aware of the growing waste problem. Yet by 1980, production had doubled. Ten years later, it doubled again to 100 million tons, surpassing the amount of steel produced globally. Today, the plastics industry, estimated to be worth more than $4 trillion, generates more than 300 million tons of plastic a year according to the most recent records — nearly half of which is for single-use items, meaning that it will almost instantly become trash.

The industry realizes that the public is not going to fall for the Crying Indian again. Our landfills are full and oceans are choked with discarded plastic of every type. Around the globe other countries refuse to accept the mountains of plastic waste that we produce every day.

The confluence of terrible news has taken public outrage over plastic to a new level. Once regarded mostly as an eyesore or a nuisance, plastic waste is now widely understood to be a cause of species extinction, ecological devastation, and human health problems. And because more than 99 percent of plastic is derived from oil, natural gas, and coal — and because its destruction also uses fossil fuels — environmental groups now recognize plastic as a major contributor to climate change.

Recycling became the ideal concept for the industry to use to yet again place the onus of plastic waste onto the consumer while relieving the industry of responsibility. The implication is simple: if people would just recycle more the problem could be resolved.

The industry’s key players know that few of its products can be cost effectively recycled and that at its best less that 10% of the plastic they produce has ever entered into a recycling loop, let alone ending up being reused. But, they reason, if people believe that putting their daily collection of plastic waste into a recycle bin will save the planet, they will ignore the fact that nothing is really being done to keep plastic out of the oceans, off of our beaches, out of our parks and literally out of the air we breathe and the water we drink.

The American Progressive Bag Alliance (APBA) promotes a variety of recycling efforts designed to encourage recycling through it’s A Bags Life program, even though most plastic bags are virtually never recycled. In Tennessee the organization promoted a school program asking elementary school students to design recycling bins that would encourage more people to recycle.

…even as A Bag’s Life was encouraging kids to spread the uplifting message of cleaning up plastic waste, its parent organization, the American Progressive Bag Alliance, was backing a state bill that would strip Tennesseans of their ability to address the plastics crisis. The legislation would make it illegal for local governments to ban or restrict bags and other single-use plastic products — one of the few things shown to actually reduce plastic waste.

The APBA’s efforts were rewarded with a state law making it impossible for local governments to take any actions to curtail the proliferation of single use plastics. No surprise here, the APBA is a part of the Plastics Industry Association (PIA). The PIA includes such heavy hitters as Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron Phillips, DowDuPont, etc.

The APBA is led by the former executive director of the Koch brother’s, Americans for Prosperity, and is aggressively pushing back at any attempt to curtail the never-ending supply of single use plastics. Working in concert with the Flexible Packaging Association, these groups have helped enact legislation in 13 states restricting the ability of local governments to regulate single use plastic.

It’s not just the big oil and chemical companies that are perpetuating the recycling scam. Everyone connected with plastic packaging is willing to pretend they are acting in good faith.  The hope that the magic word, recycling, will allow them to avoid higher costs or punishment by environment conscious consumers. For example, Starbucks saw the plastic straw controversy coming and developed a new lid for some of its products. A lid it claimed would replace a billion straws. Guess what?

…the lids are made from polypropylene (also known as No. 5 plastic), and there is very little market for recycled polypropylene, that number has no basis in reality. Only 5 percent of polypropylene was recycled in 2015 — and that was before China decided to stop taking our waste. Since then, the percentage recycled is likely much lower still, meaning that the vast majority of the 1 billion new “recyclable” Starbucks lids will end up where the old ones did — in landfills, trash heaps, incinerators, and the oceans.

The plastics industry and companies addicted to the low cost and throw away convenience of single use plastics will continue to spend millions to fight any meaningful restriction on their ability to bury the world in plastic trash. They will hold recycling up as the shiny distraction while their army of lobbyists prevent regulations that might cause any reduction in their cash flow.