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Reduce, reuse, redirect outrage: How plastic makers used recycling as a fig leaf (wamu.org)

submitted 8 months ago by MicroWave to c/news

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The plastics industry has worked for decades to convince people and policymakers that recycling would keep waste out of landfills and the environment. Consumers sort their trash so plastic packaging can be repurposed, and local governments use taxpayer money to gather and process the material. Yet from the early days of recycling, plastic makers, including oil and gas companies, knew that it wasn’t a viable solution to deal with increasing amounts of waste, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity.

Around the time the plastics industry launched its recycling campaign, the head of a trade group called the Vinyl Institute acknowledged at a 1989 conference that “recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem.”

One of the biggest challenges is that making new plastic is relatively cheap. But recycling generally costs as much as or more than the material is worth, a director of environmental solutions at B.F. Goodrich explained at another industry meeting in 1992. The “basic issue,” he said, “is economics.”

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[–] Mamertine 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You've been lied to. Recycling plastic was never about saving the planet. It was too get consumers to be okay polluting with plastic. That isn't changing. Recycling plastic is not the answer. It never was. The oil lobby spent millions to trick you into using plastic.

The article says that new recycling processes just create other pollution.

To solve this, we stop using petroleum based plastic.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

right, and how do we go about motivating humans to stop doing bad things? we tax the fuck out of them. money is the only language.

it doesnt have to be 'all or nothing'... thats just not how progress happens.