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

[mastermind]

NPR Choice page

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.

It could be because that's not what they were told.

Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic.

"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."

These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.

It may have sounded like an environmentalist's message, but the ads were paid for by the plastics industry, made up of companies like Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and trade organizations in Washington.

Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.

Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s.

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[OfTheCross]

shyt broke my heart when I recently found out that recycling plastic is bullshyt.

Now I do what I can to avoid using plastic all together

 

[mastermind]

Now I do what I can to avoid using plastic all together

This is my move now too. Paper or glass for me

 

[Prince.Skeletor]

Italy is trying to use single pasta sticks as straws
There cheap alternatives all over the place

 

[New Jeruzalem Journalist]

I was probably the biggest wishcycler ever and still carry that belief alot, but yeah, after watching a few docs and reading on this topic for years, recycling is a myth, if not an outright lie.

My ocd and wishcycling past doesn't stop me from still picking plastic bottles out the garbage at work and putting them in the recycling bin though. Force of habit.


Life on Earth was fun while it lasted brehs.

 

[EndDomination]

I've always known about the inherent problems (late-90s/early-2000s science textbooks for elementary school kids really went in-depth on environmental stuff) - but I didn't realize it was this bad until rather recently.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]