The struggle of the plastics industry to continue to pollute the world

A Bag's Life is only a small part of a mbadive effort currently being conducted by the industry to remove significant efforts to reduce plastic waste while preserving the idea of ​​recycling. The reality of plastic recycling? It's almost dead already. In 2015, the United States recycled about 9% of its plastic waste and since then its number has declined further. The vast majority of the 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic produced to date – 79% – have been found in landfills or scattered around the world. As for the plastic bags that the children hoped to contain, less than 1% of the tens of billions of plastic bags used in the United States each year are recycled.

This does not mean that we should not try to get rid of the range of toys, disposable shells, bottles, bags, take-away bins, ice cream cups, straws, bags, from yoghurt pots, pouches, candy trays, utensils, token bags, toiletry tubes, electronics and lids for everything that goes through our daily lives. We must. But we are well beyond the point where the sincere efforts of schoolchildren or all other consumers can solve the problem of plastics. The number of nonsense we give does not matter anymore. There is already too much plastic that will not decompose and will have nowhere to go, whether it is crushed or not.

National Sword of China

China's decision in 2017 to stop receiving the vast majority of plastic waste from other countries has put an end to our dysfunctional recycling system. That year, when the Chinese government announced the national sword policy, the United States sent 931 million kilograms of plastic waste to China and Hong Kong. The United States has been dumping vast amounts of scrap in this way since at least 1994, when the Environmental Protection Agency began monitoring plastics exports. This practice has both masked the growing crisis and rebadured US consumers. But in reality, much of the "recycled" plastic waste sent by the United States to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being turned into new products.

Although the reversal of the situation in China suddenly makes evident the failure of the plastic recycling system, the problem of plastics has always existed. Over the decades, with production growing exponentially, we have never been able to recycle one-tenth of our plastic waste. Since the EPA began monitoring plastics recycling in 1994, while the US recycle less than 5%, this rate has only increased by about 5% and peaked at 9.5% in 2014 Although there is no data before 1994, the rate was almost certainly even lower then. Part of this failure can be attributed to careless consumers, but much of the waste that is dumped conscientiously in the recycling bins and bags is also dumped and burned because there is no market for them. waste.

Much of the "recycled" plastic waste sent by the United States to China appears to have been burned or buried instead of being turned into new products.

The problem of plastics has been growing exponentially for decades. In 1967, when it was recommended to Dustin Hoffman's character in The Graduate to go into the plastic, less than 25 million tons were produced each year. Even at the time, plastic manufacturers were already aware of the growing problem of waste. Yet, in 1980, production doubled. Ten years later, it has doubled again to 100 million tonnes, exceeding the amount of steel produced in the world. According to the latest statistics, the plastics industry, valued at more than $ 4 trillion, generates more than 300 million tons of plastic a year, nearly half of which is for single-use products. which means that it will become almost instantly trash.

With the establishment of the new Chinese policy in January 2018, the scale of the plastics waste crisis became much more visible. Around the world, used plastic bullets that had been destined for China a year earlier began to accumulate. In the United States, some cities have completely stopped their plastic recycling programs.

In the absence of good solutions, the United States now burns six times more plastic than it recycles – although the incineration process releases carcinogenic pollutants into the air and creates toxic ashes, which must also be eliminated. somewhere. And the poor suffer the worst consequences of the plastic crisis. In the United States, eight out of ten incinerators are in poorer or less white communities than in the rest of the country, and people living nearby are exposed to toxic air pollution from their combustion.

Overall, the problem is also focused on the less fortunate and the less powerful. Since the United States can no longer ship plastic waste to China, much of this waste is destined for Turkey, Senegal and other poorly equipped countries to process it. In May, the last month for which data are available, the United States sent 64.9 million kilograms of plastic waste to 58 countries. Thailand, India and Indonesia – where more than 80% of waste is poorly managed, according to data published in Science – are among the countries that are now besieged with US plastic that is illegally thrown and burned.

All plastics in the seas

Terrifying news about plastic seems to be as inevitable as plastic itself, with tiny fragments now almost everywhere. One study found that these "microplastics" found in the air of the Pyrenees were 100 miles from the nearest town. Another discovered that microplastics are transformed into sewage sludge and spread in fields that produce food. And, as we know from regularly littered plastic whales, the oceans are flooded with plastic waste and now contain some 150 million tonnes of material, a mbad that will soon exceed the weight of all fish in the sea. .

We humans also have plastic lodged in our body. The substance that is often sold to us as a protection against contamination is in food and in water. Bottled water, whose sales increase in part because people are looking for alternatives to local contaminated water supply sources, also contains plastic. A study conducted in 2018 found that 93% of bottled water samples contained microplastics. Although all major brands have been tested positive for microplastics, the worst was Nestle Pure Life, which claims that its water "goes through a 12-step quality process, so you can trust every drop."

It should be noted that in 2017 and 2018, Nestle was among the top three brands of plastic waste that were most often picked up by the Break Free From Plastic environmental group worldwide.

The confluence of terrible news has brought the public outrage on plastic to a new level. Once considered primarily as a source of visual pollution or a nuisance, plastic waste is now widely regarded as a cause of extinction of species, ecological devastation and human health problems. And since over 99% of plastic comes from oil, natural gas and coal – and because its destruction also uses fossil fuels – environmental groups now recognize plastic as a major factor in climate change. Naturalist David Attenborough has compared the evolution of public opinion on plastics to the process by which the public reaches a consensus on the misdeeds of slavery.

Once considered primarily as a source of visual pollution or a nuisance, plastic waste is now widely regarded as a cause of extinction of species, ecological devastation and human health problems.

Between extraction, refining and waste management, production and incineration of plastics will add more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere this year alone – an amount equal to the emissions of 189 coal-fired power plants, with a power of 500 MW, according to a report from the Center for International Environmental Law.

Recycled plastics – once considered a sign of environmental virtue – are increasingly recognized as posing a threat to our health. Plastics contain additives that determine its properties, including stability, color and flexibility. Most of the thousands of these chemicals are unregulated, but it is clear that some of these additives, which are found in recycled plastics, are dangerous. One study found that half of the plastics recycled in India contained a flame retardant badociated with neurological, reproductive and developmental damage.

Black plastic, used in everything from children's toys to kitchen utensils, food packaging, mobile phone cases and thermos, seems to be particularly dangerous. Plastics often come from recycled electronic products containing phthalates, flame retardants and heavy metals such as cadmium, lead and mercury. Even at very low concentrations, these chemicals can cause serious reproductive and developmental problems.

But most additives are neither monitored nor well studied. "The industry has no idea what it puts in plastic or who did it," said Andrew Turner, a British chemist who recently discovered toxic chemicals in 40% of plastic toys black, thermoses, badtail stirrers and utensils. tested. In some plastics, he found chemicals present at 30 times the safety standards set by governments.

Even regulated chemicals often have limits for electronic products but not for recycled products. "You have something that would not comply with the regulations as an electrical element because its levels are too high, but because it has become a fork, nothing prevents it from To use, "said Turner. Antimony, which Turner found in food containers, toys and office supplies, "is limited to drinking water, but not to electrical waste." Turner and Zhanyun Wang, another scientist who I spoke to and who studies plastic additives to plastics, said they do not use any more black plastic utensils. . "Given this option, I would prefer something white or clear," said Turner, adding that he was trying to avoid plastic utensils.

The solution to this global mess must clearly be much larger than personal cutlery choices. Greenpeace, the Surfrider Foundation, As You Sow, the Rainforest Alliance and 5Gyres, an organization created by a couple who have crossed the Pacific Ocean to sail, are among the organizations that demand recycling and require companies to limit the production of plastic . raft made from discarded bottles. Fueled by rising consumer frustration with products that make them complicit in the problem, restaurants and grocery-free grocers are emerging.

Taxes, bans and royalties on plastic products are gaining ground around the world. In March, the European Union voted to ban single-use plastics by 2021. In June, Canada followed suit. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised not only to ban single-use plastics such as bags, straws and cutlery, but also plastics makers responsible for their waste. One hundred and forty-one countries, including China, Bangladesh, India and 34 African countries, have introduced taxes or partial bans on plastics.

In the United States, the Trump administration has opposed international efforts to crack down on plastic waste, so cities and towns are leading the way. While only eight states have adopted restrictions on plastics, more than 330 local ordinances on plastic bags have been adopted in 24 states. Some federal lawmakers have also recognized that federal action is needed to counter the rising tide of plastics. "The recycling of plastics is not a realistic solution to the crisis of plastic pollution. Most consumer plastics are economically impractical to recycle based on market conditions alone, "said Representative Alan Lowenthal and Senator Tom Udall in a letter to President Donald Trump in June, noting that" the proliferation of plastic disposable plastic pollution in the United States and imposed a growing financial burden on state agencies, local governments and taxpayers for cleanup.

Big Plastic Fights Back

Even the leaders of a recent conference of the plastic industry admit to how much the crisis is serious – at least between them. All we hear is "we need to get rid of plastics," Garry Kohl of PepsiCo told his fellow members of the Plastics Industry Association at a conference in April. Gathered in the Golden Ballroom of a Dallas hotel, representatives of leading plastics manufacturers, recyclers, raw material suppliers, extruders, brand owners and other stakeholders the plastics sector discussed their role in the crisis aloud. According to Kohl, who leads PepsiCo's snacks and food packaging innovation, it's particularly difficult to see the widely circulated image of a dead albatross filled with plastic. "It's very moving for our top managers," said Kohl, while the now iconic image of the Albatross – just a few feathers and a decaying beak arranged around an badortment of bottle caps, more coins light and plastic pieces – sprang up above him. . "They all talk about the albatross."

Patty Long, Acting President and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, the group that convened the Texas meeting, also acknowledged the pain of being the public face of an industry deemed to be responsible for the devastation of the natural world. Long confessed to having gone through another social media phenomenon that, along with the albatross, had changed the course of the plastic war: the video of the sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in his nostril. Long is not the only one. Since its release in 2015, the unsustainable eight minutes in which marine biologists are shooting at plastic straw with tweezers while the creature wriggles and bleeds have been seen 36 million times.

Overall, for a long time, Long admits, 376 anti-plastic bills have been introduced and the perception of the plastics industry has continued to "regress exponentially". The Plastics Industry Association has taken a bad image Working to make up for it seriously with plastic presentations for elementary and high school students, a program of plastic ambbadadors and, so that young people can "feel "to work in the industry," said Long, a group of "future leaders in plastic".

However, the dead albatrosses, the blood turtle and the public image of the industry are not a problem, but companies that produce billions of dollars in plastic have no intention of slowing down. Instead, the industry is gearing up for the fight of his life, which may explain why a real war expert gave the keynote address at the plastics conference.

The industry is preparing for the struggle of his life, which may explain why an actual war expert gave the keynote address at the plastics conference.

In 2000, the commander of the US Navy. Kirk Lippold guided his crew as part of a terrorist attack against the USS Cole, during which 17 sailors were killed and 39 wounded. Now a crisis management consultant, Lippold has brought to the public at the Plastics Industry Association an exhausting tale of victims, deaths and near – by experiences, as well as a ship filled with the latest news. shrapnel taking with water. His story, which came to an end when Lippold flew his shackled ship on the high seas with the resounding national anthem, suggested that with enough determination, the makers of the plastics industry could also be able to overcome the threats that threatened them.

What is at stake for them is not just the current plastics market, which currently accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but its likely expansion. The drop in oil and gas prices means that the cost of manufacturing the new plastic, already very low, will be even cheaper. Falling prices led to the completion of more than 700 projects in the plastics industry, including the expansion of old facilities and the construction of new plants, including by Chevron, Shell, Dow, Exxon, Formosa Plastics, Nova Chemicals and Bayport Polymers. , according to a presentation by the director of regulatory affairs at BASF Corporation at the plastics industry conference.

The growing production of cheap new plastics is further undermining the industry's argument that recycling can solve the waste crisis. It is already impossible for most recycled plastics to compete with "virgin" plastics on the market. With the exception of PET (No. 1) and HDPE (No. 2) bottles, the rest of the waste is essentially worthless. About 30% of both types of plastic bottles were sold for recycling in 2017, but some of them may have been buried or incinerated. The recent explosion of fossil fuel makes the manufacture of new plastic even cheaper and thus makes it more difficult to sell the recycled product. This makes it all the more unlikely for plastics companies to advocate for recycling – and their struggle to destroy efforts to limit the production of plastics is even more desperate.

Prohibit plastic bans

Matt Seaholm, executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, seemed to appreciate his role in the fight. At the plastics industry conference, others tended to struggle and at least recognize the problem of plastic waste, but Seaholm had no hesitation in opposing environmental groups that attracted him. In Texas, Seaholm, the former National Director of Prosperity-led Americans by the Koch brothers, is positioned as the enemy of environmentalists.

"They hate what we do," Seaholm told his colleagues in the plastics industry at the conference with a mischievous smile. "We wear this as a sign of honor." The fact that environmental groups oppose the APBA's tactics, Seaholm added, is proof that his lobby group "must do something good".

The APBA began to fight the restrictions imposed on plastics in the country in 2011. By 2015, the industrial group has improved its game. Rather than simply opposing individual bans, the company has not been able to do so. APBA has begun lobbying for state pre-emption laws to be adopted. This approach, used by another group related to the Koch brothers, the American Legislative Exchange Council, to fight local action on other issues, including pesticide restrictions and minimum wage laws. , prevents cities and municipalities from banning local plastic bans. In the last eight years, the American Chemistry Council has helped pbad pre-emption bills based on the ALEC model in 13 states. According to Seaholm, who joined the group in 2016, 42% of Americans now live in states where they can not escape local bans on plastics.

Other pressure groups in the plastics industry, including ALEC's American City County Exchange and the National Federation of Independent Business, have also argued for preemption, or "uniformity," as they call it, on the grounds that the ban hurts companies that use plastic. While presenting the bans as bad for businesses and the poor, who they say will be disproportionately affected, the industry has also used campaign donations to argue its case. Over the past year, the Flexible Packaging Association, whose members include Dow, Exxon Mobil Chemical, SABIC, Chevron Phillips Chemical and LyondellBasell, has more than doubled its spending nationally. The group has significantly increased its contribution to Tennessee lawmakers, for example, the year before the adoption of the Bag Preemption Bill.

While APBA is striving to force pre-emption on plastics, the group's national spending is unclear because, as a full entity of the Plastics Industry Association, the federal government does not require make public spending. But the information provided by state lobbying shows that he has spent millions of dollars in favor of a total ban. This advocacy in favor of the plastic ban puts members of the plastics industry badociations, including PepsiCo, Walmart and the Carlyle Group, in an uncomfortable situation. All of these brands publicly announced sustainable development commitments that seemed to defeat the group's struggles with local laws limiting plastics.

Asked about the apparent dissonance between his commitment to sustainable development and his participation in the Plastics Industry Association, Walmart sent an e-mail statement that "Walmart's aspiration is to achieve zero plastic waste. We are taking action throughout our company to use less plastic, recycle more, and support innovations to improve plastic waste reduction systems. The statement also states that Walmart has "asked its suppliers to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging, increase the recyclability of packaging and recycled content," and to help educate our customers on reducing, reusing and plastic recycling. "

PepsiCo and the Carlyle Group have not responded to requests for comment.

Seaholm seemed not to care about the terrible optics of the industry's fight against environmental protection efforts with plastic bans, which he ridiculed as "mainly motivated by emotion ". "They do it because it's good for them," Seaholm told the plastics company. executives in Dallas. "They manage to fight each other."

The plastics vs. industry Two little girls

In Isle of Palms, South Carolina, the people who piloted the first ban on plastic bags in 2015 do not disagree that their efforts are motivated by emotions. Suzette Head and Mila Kosmos, who live in the small coastal town near Charleston, shouted with joy as their local ordinance was pbaded. "I felt happy that the bags were gone," recalls Mila, now 9 years old.

The effort began with another emotion, when the two girls were in kindergarten: sadness. Suzette was at her local aquarium when a naturalist brandished a jar with a gray swirl inside and asked what the kids thought of it. Suzette thought it was a jellyfish and said it. When she learned that it was actually a plastic bag and that a turtle could die if she made the same mistake and ate the bag, she s & # 39; He is distraught.

«Suzette aime les animaux», a expliqué sa mère, Kathy Kent. De retour de l'aquarium après la manifestation, ils ont commencé à expliquer comment ils pourraient empêcher les gens de jeter leurs sacs en plastique. «Au début, je lui ai dit: eh bien, vous ne pouvez pas changer les gens», a déclaré Kent. "Mais ensuite, je me suis écouté et j'ai pensé, Oh mon Dieu, que dis-je et je l'ai rapidement ramené." Sans avoir aucune idée de ce qu'elle promettait exactement, Kent a dit à sa fille qu'ils feraient quelque chose pour garder du plastique sacs de se retrouver dans l'océan. Peu de temps après, ils ont fait équipe avec Mila et sa mère, ainsi que plusieurs autres résidents de Isle of Palms, également mécontents du plastique. L’après-midi, ils se promèneraient sur la plage pour rambader des sacs et faire du brainstorming. Finalement, ils ont eu l’idée de rédiger une pétition pour interdire les sacs et ont fait du porte à porte pour obtenir le soutien de plusieurs propriétaires de magasins locaux.

"C'était un jeu d'enfant de demander aux entreprises de nous soutenir", a déclaré Kent. "Tout le monde sait qu’une plage propre et sans ordures est bonne pour tout le monde et toutes les entreprises." Un peu plus d’un an après la visite troublante de Suzette à l’aquarium, l’ordonnance a été adoptée par le conseil municipal lors de son premier vote. Pourtant, près de quatre ans plus tard, la Caroline du Sud envisage maintenant d'adopter une loi soutenue par l'APBA qui interdirait non seulement les interdictions futures, mais annulerait également l'ordonnance en vigueur à Isle of Palms et 17 autres lois locales interdisant depuis le plastique pour le plastique en Caroline du Sud.

L'indien qui pleure

Si l’image des multinationales géantes détruisant les efforts des petites filles pour protéger les créatures marines n’est pas flatteuse, l’industrie du plastique peut se consoler du fait qu’elle a déjoué avec succès les tentatives des écologistes de le tenir responsable du plastique avec des tactiques similaires. Le truc a été d’adhérer publiquement aux préoccupations de ses adversaires pour l’environnement tout en luttant en privé contre les tentatives de réglementation.

La stratégie à double tranchant remonte au moins à 1969, lorsqu'un éditorial du magazine Modern Plastics a mis en garde sur la crise imminente des déchets. Les grands fabricants de plastiques étaient déjà conscients du problème. Cette année-là, DuPont, Chevron, Dow et la Society for the Plastics Industry figuraient parmi les groupes représentés à une conférence sur les déchets d’emballages. Et lorsque le premier Jour de la Terre a été lancé en 1970, en partie pour faire face à cette crise, l’industrie était prête.

Cette semaine-là, les manifestants ont organisé un «trek écologique» au cours duquel ils ont jeté leurs bouteilles non consignées au siège de Coca-Cola. Les activistes avaient une solution à la crise croissante des déchets: des factures de bouteilles qui imposeraient la responsabilité de nettoyer les déchets aux fabricants. Coca-Cola, qui avait été informée des manifestations par l'Association nationale des boissons gazeuses, a rencontré les manifestants avec des bacs à soda et à ordures gratuits. Les grandes entreprises de boissons et d’emballages se sont opposées à la facture de bouteille et ont mis au point une astuce intelligente qui porte toujours ses fruits. Non seulement ont-ils considéré les partisans des factures de bouteille comme des radicaux, mais ils ont également lancé une vaste campagne de relations publiques qui semblait intégrer une partie de la colère suscitée par les déchets grandissants qui avaient alimenté les manifestations du Jour de la Terre, tout en transférant la responsabilité des déchets aux entreprises. qui l'a créé et sur les consommateurs.

En 1971, Keep America Beautiful, une organisation anti-déchets créée par des entreprises de conditionnement et de boissons, telles que PepsiCo, Coca-Cola et Phillip Morris, s’est alliée au conseil d’administration pour créer la désormais infâme publicité «Crying Indian». Bien que «l'Indien» qui déchire quand il voit un sac de litière jetée à terre est en réalité un acteur italo-américain avec une plume coincée dans ses cheveux, la publicité la plus sournoise est que son expression d'inquiétude au sujet de la pollution a été portée au premier plan. les ondes émises par bon nombre des mêmes entreprises qui ont généré la pollution. Même si leur publicité incitait les téléspectateurs à se sentir coupables d’avoir répandu des déchets, les membres de Keep America Beautiful se battaient contre une législation qui aurait pu faire beaucoup pour résoudre ce problème.

"Ce qui rend la chose encore plus insidieuse, c'est que ces spots télévisés et autres publicités ont été présentés comme des annonces de service public – et ont donc semblé être politiquement neutres – mais, en fait, ont servi le programme de l'industrie", a déclaré l'historien Finis Dunaway, qui a exposé l'histoire des efforts de relations publiques de Keep America Beautiful dans «Seeing Green: Exploiter et abuser d'images de l'environnement». «C'était une propagande qui n'apparaissait pas comme une propagande. Il a également protégé les entreprises polluantes du blâme en transférant la responsabilité aux individus. "

"Ces spots télévisés et autres publicités ont été présentés comme des annonces de service public – et ont donc semblé être politiquement neutres – mais, en fait, ils ont servi le programme de l'industrie."

Les Journées de la Terre de demain continueraient à mettre l'accent sur la responsabilité personnelle des consommateurs en matière de recyclage, y compris la commémoration nationale du 10e Jour de la Terre organisé en 1980 par Michael McCabe, ancien badistant législatif qui continuerait à occuper le poste de directeur des communications et des projets spéciaux de Joe Biden. avant de prendre la tête de la défense par DuPont d’un produit chimique dangereux utilisé dans de nombreux plastiques, l’APFO. En 1990, la célébration du 20e anniversaire a été marquée par une émission télévisée animée par des célébrités soulignant l’importance des actions individuelles, y compris la plantation d’arbres et le recyclage, dans la protection de l’environnement.

À ce jour, Keep America Beautiful – qui est toujours dirigée par des dirigeants de sociétés de boissons et de plasturgie, notamment Dr Pepper, Dow, et le Conseil américain de la chimie – continue de se concentrer sur les cendriers, incitant les citoyens errants à mieux se débarrbader de leurs de ses membres s'opposent à la réglementation de leur production de ces déchets. Plusieurs sociétés partenaires du groupe – parmi lesquelles les sociétés fondatrices Coca-Cola et PepsiCo et leur groupe professionnel, l’American Beverage Association – se sont opposées aux factures de bouteilles, qui se sont révélées utiles pour résoudre le problème des déchets plastiques.

Noah Ullman, chief marketing officer for Keep America Beautiful, disputes the idea that the organization was founded “as some kind of ruse. The intent was not there,” he said in a phone interview. Instead, Ullman wrote in an email to The Intercept, “the first objective of Keep America Beautiful was, and remains, encouraging people to ‘put it in the bin.’ Preventing litter is the basis for everything else — it helps keep communities beautiful (which has a long list of social and economic benefits) and helps protect animals and our environment from solid waste ending up in unintended places.” Ullman said that the organization does not take a position on bottle bills, but noted that while bottle bills improve the collection rates of refunded materials, the “unintended consequence is that [it] devalues the rest of the waste stream for recycling (e.g. glbad, cartons, milk jugs, etc.) and those items become less likely to be recycled.”

The American Beverage Association, which has opposed bottle bills in the past, provided The Intercept with a statement, saying, “We are not opposed to any ideas that will get us to better recycling rates in the future if they do not harm the comprehensive curbside recycling systems that consumers prefer.”

In an email, a representative of Coca-Cola wrote that the American Beverage Association represents the company’s views on bottle bills. The email also said that “at Coca-Cola, our focus is on helping to collect and reuse the equivalent of 100 percent of the bottles and cans that we put into the marketplace. This includes ensuring that all of our packaging is 100% recyclable and using at least 50% recycled content in our packaging by 2030.”

With their focus on recycling and nonprofit status, Keep America Beautiful and other anti-litter organizations funded by the plastics and beverage industry, including the Recycling Partnership, offer companies both the opportunity to demonstrate concern about plastic pollution and a tax write off. The Coca-Cola Foundation gave $640,000 to the Recycling Partnership to improve recycling in 2017, for instance. The organization “works with thousands of communities all across the country to provide access to cart-based recycling and education to help residents understand how to recycle materials more and better, including paper, aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, cartons, glbad and, yes, plastics,” according to an emailed statement from the organization, which also noted that only half of Americans who have access to convenient recycling do everything they could.

While working to improve recycling and create end markets for recycled plastic, the Recycling Partnership  also presents a particularly rosy view of recycling. In May, the group sent out an email that announced that “87% of People Think Recycling is Important,” while failing to mention the reality of single-digit recycling rates. The group’s other funding partners include ExxonMobil, Keurig, Dr. Pepper, Dow, the International Bottled Water Association, the American Beverage Association, and the American Chemistry Council.

“They’re trying to create the perception that there’s a viable way to recycle most plastic waste into new products, and that’s simply not true.”

In an emailed statement, the Recycling Partnership noted that only half of Americans who have access to convenient recycling do everything they could. “The Recycling Partnership works with thousands of communities all across the country to provide access to cart-based recycling and education to help residents understand how to recycle materials more and better, including paper, aluminum and steel cans, cardboard, cartons, glbad and, yes, plastics.” The statement also said that the group is working to create and support end markets for recycled plastic.

But according to Jan Dell, an engineer who worked as a corporate sustainability consultant before creating The Last Beach Cleanup, an organization that confronts plastics pollution, the Recycling Partnership and other nonprofits supported by the plastics industry are using misleading information to ease concerns that otherwise might lead consumers to stop buying plastic. “They’re trying to create the perception that there’s a viable way to recycle most plastic waste into new products,” said Dell, “and that’s simply not true.”

The “Recyclable” Scam

Much of the plastic waste that is ambading in the oceans, buried in landfills, and scattered throughout nature is “recyclable,” which is to say that it could, in theory, be refashioned into new products. Companies have latched on to the hopeful term to make their latest plastic products more palatable. Starbucks, for instance, has lavished praise on itself for its “recyclable lid” rolling out in six cities this summer, which the company predicted will eliminate a billion straws. But because 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.

In January, Taco Bell also crowed over its own new plastic lids, as if creating more plastic would somehow fix the plastics crisis. “Love the Earth? Yep, us too,” the company’s website announced, “which is why we’ve recently started to use recyclable cold cups and lids in all of our restaurants.”

Another company, Tempo Plastics, explicitly advertises its plastic pouches as “guilt-free.” Although they’re made from high-density polyethylene, or No. 2 plastic — only 5.5 percent of which is recycled in the U.S. — the company’s new “Harmony Pack” will feature rebaduring green arrows and the imprimatur of How2Recycle.

A project of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and recycling nonprofit called GreenBlue — whose board includes executives from Dow Chemical, Mars, Target, Amazon, and the Delfort Group — How2Recycle makes some plastic products seem far easier to recycle than they are. The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guide makes it clear that “to misrepresent, directly or by implication, that a product or package is recyclable” is deceptive. In order to make unqualified claims that a product is recyclable, recycling facilities have to be available to at least 60 percent of the consumers to whom it’s sold. But the How2Recycle symbol is now affixed to several products that will be all but impossible for many consumers to recycle, including cups, plates, and containers made from plastics Nos. 3 through 7, all of which now have recycling rates close to zero.

Asked about the “guilt-free” pouch, Kelly Cramer, director of How2Recycle at GreenBlue, wrote in an email that the product was not “appropriately qualified” for the label and said that the organization would “reach out to this company immediately to rectify.” Regarding the pictures of plastic cups and plates that are not accepted by recyclers in most parts of the country but whose packaging bore the How2Recycle label, Cramer said that the label referred to the bags that contained the cups and plates, which is recyclable if brought back to an in-store recycling program, but acknowledged that the plates and cups inside them were not recyclable.

Although How2Recycle provides “not recyclable” as well as “recyclable” labels, it is the member companies’ choice whether to apply them, she said. “That member chose not to label the product,” Cramer said. “This is an area where we’ve given the member a choice to label the product or not. If we were too strict in our requirements, we wouldn’t have as many members join the program.”

Cramer argued that another product, cups made of polypropylene, or No. 5 plastic, may or may not qualify as recyclable — a question that is now being litigated in a federal court in California. Cramer said that GreenBlue is conducting research into the recycling rates of polypropylene and defended the How2Recycle program as a way to minimize waste that is a fact of modern life.

“We don’t want people to think that recycling alleviates all their consumption guilt. But the truth of the matter is that we all consume, and packaging protects products that have to be moved to be sold,” she said. “In the future, it would be beautiful if we had robust reuse or novel delivery systems to rethink the entire product packaging system. But we’re not there yet.”

Although recycling does little to alleviate the mounting plastics crisis, the promotion of it has proven extremely useful to the industry when local bans on plastic bans have been proposed. The American Chemistry Council recently rolled out local campaigns for WRAP, or the Wrap Recycling Action Program, in several places where plastic bans have been proposed.

The public-private partnership run by the ACC, which encourages the recycling of plastic bags through 18,000 plastic film collection sites around the country and promotes the idea that plastic bags can be recycled, launched a new effort in Connecticut in 2017 that coincided with the state’s consideration of a tax on plastic bags. When Chicago was weighing a plastic bag tax in 2016, the ACC rolled out WRAP there too, announcing that locals can recycle plastic bags “at nearly 400 local grocery and retail stores.” This year, in Florida, the ACC made another local WRAP push just as a state-level bill to ban plastic straws was introduced.

The group teaches the public how to recycle plastic film — any plastic less than 10 mil thick — a process that turns out to be complicated enough to require its own educational organization. Most municipal recycling programs don’t accept shopping bags and other flexible plastic, which can snag machines. So WRAP directs consumers to bring it to local take-back centers, which collect the film and send it on to recyclers. The plastic first has to be washed and dried, according to WRAP, and even then only some of it can be recycled. The program can recycle the clear wrap you might put around food at home, as well as bags that contain most produce, groceries, and bread, but not candy-bar wrappers, six-pack rings, and the plastic bags that contain chips or frozen food.

But even as WRAP promotes the message that plastic film can and should be recycled, and to scold people who don’t put plastic bags in recycle bins, many of the used bags and other plastic waste it collects wind up being burned or sent to landfills. According to the most recent report on plastic film recycling published in July by the ACC, the amount collected in the U.S. and sold for recycling fell from 1.3 billion to 1.0 billion pounds between 2016 and 2017 — and that was before China’s restriction on plastic waste imports was fully implemented. The ACC report admitted that some of the bags wound up where they would have if they didn’t first make a brief stop in a bag-recycling bin. “Due to a lack of buyers — for the quality and amount of material available — towards the end of 2017, landfilling material started to be more economical (despite diversion or other environmental goals) than covering the handling and shipping costs of getting material to market.”

It’s not clear what happened to the 300 million pounds of film that were sold for recycling in 2016 but not in 2017. Because the ACC doesn’t report the total amount of plastic film collected, what proportion of the collected film that represents is also obscure. Nor is it clear why the ACC has not yet reported the 2018 numbers. But even within the 1 billion pounds of plastic film the ACC categorized as “recycled,” much is likely either burned or landfilled. According to the report, 378 million pounds of the film were exported, and the ACC said in an emailed statement to The Intercept that it doesn’t know what happened to the waste after that point.

Although the ACC doesn’t put an exact number on the total amount of bags that were burned or landfilled, a recent call to action from a group of plastics recyclers called Recycle More Bags does. The document, which came out in May and called for legislation that would require that new plastic bags contain recycled material, noted that “600 million pounds of plastic bags collected for recycling in North America in 2018 was landfilled or incinerated due to lack of end-markets.” A later version of the document changed the figure to “hundreds of millions of pounds.”

“Based on the two industry reports, it looks like we may have incinerated and disposed of the same amount of plastic film and bags that were reprocessed,” said Dell.

Recycling or Burning?

One of the latest solutions industry is offering to the plastics crisis isn’t recycling exactly. While many questions remain about what exactly the Hefty EnergyBag program is, it is making it clear how expensive and difficult it is to find a use for plastic waste.

In April, 49 years after protesters kicked off the first Earth Day by dumping single-use waste at Coca-Cola’s doorstep, Dow Chemical was a “forest green sponsor” of Omaha’s Earth Day event, despite the fact that it is the largest plastics manufacturer in the world. With a $5,000 gift, Dow’s Hefty EnergyBag program, a joint effort of Dow and Reynolds Consumer Products, was one of the two biggest donors for the event. Held in Omaha’s lush Elmwood Park, the day’s festivities were as green and wholesome as any corporate sponsor could want. Native American folk music played as locals strolled the grbad from table to table learning about urban beekeeping, rain barrels, microchickens, and tree planting. Children stroked a soft gray rabbit. And dozens of environmentally concerned Nebraskans participated in an outdoor yoga clbad, bending and stretching in the sun along with their neighbors.

Dow and Hefty first rolled out the program on Earth Day 2016 as a way for Omaha residents to dispose of plastic forks and knives, chip bags, and other single-use plastics that the city hadn’t been able to process. They just had to put the plastic trash into special orange Hefty bags, put them out on the curb, and the city would pick up and recycle the trash. “They were very definitely calling it recycling,” recalls Richard Yoder, a local sustainability consultant. But Yoder and other Omahanians soon learned that rather than being melted down into reusable plastic, the contents of their bags were being burned in an incinerator in Missouri that had a history of Clean Air Act violations.

Last year, after Yoder argued at a local debate over the program that calling the Energybag program recycling was misleading, Hefty stopped using that term. Yet, in labored language, the company’s website still pitches the program as an environmental good, or “a groundbreaking initiative that collects hard to recycle plastics.” The Hefty EnergyBag program “complements existing recycling programs,” according to Ashley Mendoza, a spokesperson for Dow. “Our long-term vision is to keep more plastics out of landfills by collecting them for recycling or recovery if they cannot be reused.”

After the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives called out the Omaha program for creating more pollution, the Dow and Hefty initiative also stopped sending the orange bags to the incinerator. Since then, the plastic waste has been put to several purposes, including being compressed into fence posts and railroad ties and going “to a Canadian firm that made some sort of decking,” according to Dale Gubbels, CEO of FirstStar Recycling, the Omaha company partnering with Dow and Hefty on the project.

Because no one has learned how to remove additives from plastic, products made from recycled waste can release toxic chemicals as they degrade.

While Dow and Hefty promote the program as a way to convert plastic into “valuable energy sources,” it isn’t cheap, according to Gubbels. The expense has apparently disappointed some initial proponents, who expected the program to pay for itself. “I have to try to convince them if you want to recycle, you have to recognize that you’ve got to pay for it,” he said. All in all, he added, the program, which was pitched as an energy-efficient solution to plastic waste, has proven “far more challenging than anyone had envisioned when this thing got started.” According to an email from Mendoza, “The price of the Hefty® EnergyBag® orange bags cover the cost of running the program.”

Scientists point out another hitch in the energy bag plan: Because no one has learned how to remove additives from plastic, products made from recycled waste, such as the railroad ties, fence posts, and decks made from Omaha’s plastic, can release toxic chemicals as they degrade. “Until we do a better job of eliminating the hazards in its first use, you’re going to have problems managing the toxicity in every subsequent use,” said Pete Myers, a biologist and the founder and chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences. “Some of the types of plastics that they’re proposing to recycle contain chemicals connected to a 50-year decline in sperm count, to type 2 diabetes, and to bad and prostate cancer. These are serious problems and we don’t know enough about the exposures to make it safe for the child sitting on that deck.”

When asked about this possibility, Gubbels said he hadn’t considered it and didn’t have expertise in toxic chemicals. In any case, Gubbels has been spreading Omaha’s plastic waste around. He sent one recent load to Renewlogy, a plant in Salt Lake City, Utah, that heats the plastic and extracts energy from it, and said he plans to send a load to a similar plastic-to-energy facility in Texas called New Hope Energy.

The Myth of “Chemical Recycling”

Renewlogy and New Hope are two firms offering what the plastics industry is putting forward as the newest solution to plastic waste: so-called chemical recycling. According to the American Chemistry Council, expanding plastics recovery into this realm could “result in billions of dollars of economic output.” Yet even the technology’s biggest proponents acknowledge that no one yet knows how to efficiently and economically convert plastic into its component parts and then back into fuel. If all the non-recycled plastics in the U.S. were converted to oil, “we could create enough fuel to power 9 million cars each year,” the Chevron Phillips sustainability director, Rick Wagner, argued in a recent article in Plastics Recycling Update magazine. That transformation would also allow Chevron, the second-largest plastic manufacturer in the world, to shrug off its responsibility for the mbadive quantities of pollution now choking the globe. But even Wagner admits that we’re still far from knowing how to chemically recycle. It’s sort of like going to Mars, Wagner wrote. “We’re not quite there yet. Not tomorrow, but someday. Hopefully soon.” Mendoza described pyrolysis, the method used by the Renewlogy plant to which Hefty EnergyBag waste has already been sent, as “a potential next step toward advanced recycling.”

The idea that plastic can be broken down into its elements, which can then be turned into fuel, waxes, and lubricants has been around for decades. But such waste-to-fuel plants have never proven economically or environmentally viable. According to a 2017 report of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, most of the waste-to-fuel projects in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, which used either pyrolysis or a related technology called gasification, were closed or canceled before even getting off the ground. Among the impediments cited in the report were the inability to meet energy efficiency and pollution control goals. “In general, costs are higher and more uncertain than project proponents foresee and revenues are lower and more uncertain,” the report noted.

Waste-to-fuel plants have never proven economically or environmentally viable.

The environmental and financial viability of the latest energy-to-fuel plants is also unclear. When asked about the efficiency of the facilities used by the Hefty EnergyBag program, Mendoza wrote in an email that “material efficiency of a pyrolysis processing unit is dependent on the technology used and the types of materials fed into the facility.” Mendoza also wrote that “Dow has a vital interest and responsibility in making plastic materials beneficial throughout their lifecycle. We are working to improve the entire system where our products are used in order to maximize resource efficiency and the benefits derived from using our products.”

Neither New Hope or Renewlogy, two of the nine companies in the American Chemistry Council’s industry alliance for chemical recycling, would reveal what volume of plastics their plants require to produce fuel. Renewlogy did not respond to numerous emailed interview requests. But the company’s website says that between Omaha’s waste and that collected through a similar Hefty EnergyBag program in the city of Boise, a million pounds of plastic were “diverted” in 2018. A video on the site also describes Renewlogy’s process as cost-effective and “proven clean.” The New Hope plant in Texas issued a press release announcing that it will have a capacity to process 150 tons of plastic a day, but the company declined to comment on that facility’s efficiency. “It’s a brand-new industry and there are some things we can’t communicate about,” said Lee Royal, who answered the phone there. “How we do business is probably not something we’d like to share just now.”

In an emailed statement, the American Chemistry Council defended the value of chemical recycling, noting that “these technologies can produce a wide range of products beyond fuel, including higher value chemicals and other feedstocks” and that such products “have much greater value in the marketplace than in a landfill.”