In the early 1980s, some North American cities began to realize that the waste generated by plastic was enormous and uncontrollable. Technicians and activists began to talk about regulations and prohibitions, but the industry found another way to solve it: recycling.
The standard. For 50 years, the petrochemical industry has promoted recycling as the ‘gold standard’ for solving plastic pollution. Today, We know that only 9% of all plastic produced historically has been recycled. It was not a miscalculationnor a display of naive optimism: it was a large-scale industrial fraud.
A documented fraud. In 1973, ahead of the regulatory wave, the Society of the Plastics Industry commissioned a report to see what could be done with the plastic they made themselves. The study’s conclusions were devastating: not only did it recognize the inherent degradation of resins in each reprocessing cycle, but it made clear that (even in the best of cases) there was no market for the final product.
And, of course, the industry didn’t care.
A report from the Center for Climate Integrity and the summary of a macro-case by the California attorney general against ExxonMobil give us the keys to understand it.
Because it’s not exactly a secret. An Exxon employee recognized in 1994 before the American Plastics Council that “the company was committed to recycling activities, but not to their results.” The founder of the Vinyl Institute (one of the sector’s lobbies) admitted in 1989 that recycling could not be continued indefinitely and that, of course, it did not solve the problem of solid waste.
We have proof. What’s more, for decades, we have known that there are internal documents that show patterns of investments in recycling plants that were closed or abandoned once they had fulfilled their public relations function. The tests go on and on.
However, no one paid much attention. The parallelism with climate denialism ands patent: the documentation is crystal clear. The industry knew recycling wouldn’t work, but spent millions and millions actively promoting it with the idea of avoiding regulations.
And why is it news now? Because there are doubts that this is over. Yes, the average citizen has internalized that separating waste and depositing it in the yellow container (or the equivalent system) is an effective environmental action. In fact, the better the citizen recycles, the more effective the industry’s alibi is to continue producing plastic without restrictions. Recycling actually displaces regulatory pressure.
Because the data (and recycling rates whatever the approach) is not as good as we might think. And the problem is volume. Plastic production is going at such a speed that even by significantly improving recycling rates we would not be able to reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in the environment.
And what do we do? That’s the big question: what do we do. Our society has become so dependent on plastic that the most effective solutions are outside the realm of possibility. But if the situation continues like thisthey will stop being so sooner rather than later.
Image | Nick Fewings
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