Even for those who are ‘woke’ on the truth about plastics, trying to avoid them in modern life is virtually impossible. Once we allow ourselves to understand that 90% of the plastic produced globally is not recycled but ends up as increasingly toxic waste all around us, thinking people see an urgency to insist on bans and producer responsibility without further delay.
Turns out that the recycling myth has been actively cultivated by plastic producers–oil companies–as a way to keep us mindlessly consuming. This is much more broadly devastating than cigarette companies knowingly misleading the public about the harm inflicted by their products.
To help meet its growth targets, big oil is unabashedly investing in yet another false advertising campaign to make the public believe that the plastics we toss in bins are recycled. A new investigative report from NPR and PBS Frontline finds that oil cos have been actively working to convince us of this lie since the 1970s even as our health, environment and water systems continue to absorb the toxic costs of producing their profits.
Recycling plastics can be done but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive and plastic degrades each time it is reused, so the truth is that it can’t be reused more than once or twice. What’s more, doing so runs counter to present producer incentives.
The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic. See How Big Oil Misled the Public into thinking Plastics Would be Recycled:
“..if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.
“You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Thomas says. “Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that’s their business.”
And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.”
