How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

[orleans]

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.

"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it."

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

there is also a 24 minute audio on the above link

[Backseat Driver]

1. Well, I'm delighted to be conned at no more

readily imagined cost than that needed for my electric bill and my internet ISP: https://www.freetheocean.com/ while I learn a daily trivia fact about the ocean and its inhabitants.

[SheltieLover]

2. K&R!

[Shermann]

3. Not all of the FAIL is on Big Oil

What's the deal with the resin identification codes? There still isn't a clear way for consumers to know if an item can be recycled. The codes don't accomplish that. FAIL

Apparently the material recovery facilities can't deal with super-tricky things like bottle caps and plastic bags and labels and clamshells and small plastic objects. FAIL

Then you have assholes putting obviously wrong things in their bins like garden hoses. FAIL

[Delarage]

4. Great episode on Frontline about this

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/

We really need to pressure companies to reduce their use of plastic. I try as best I can to avoid it or at least re-use what I can (old peanut butter jars to store random screws, etc.) but we really need government action as well.

It was the late 1980s, and the plastics industry was under fire.

Facing heightened public concern about ever-increasing amounts of garbage, the image of plastics was falling dramatically. State and local officials across the country were considering banning some kinds of plastics in an effort to reduce waste and pollution.

But the industry had a plan; a way to fend off plastic bans and keep its sales growing.

It would publicly promote recycling as the solution to the waste crisis — despite internal industry doubts, from almost the beginning, that widespread plastic recycling could ever be economically viable.