The Plastics Industry’s Feel Good Campaign
Recently when our sustainability group met, we had a presentation from a local executive chef who has made it his quest to cook sustainably, looking at food miles traveled and comparing organic versus petro-grown foods and so forth. Then he said something about our community that really caught my attention: “It’s really great. They’re taking plastics all the way up to #7 for recycling.” That really got me thinking that this is all a nefarious plot on the part of the plastics industry.
The plastics industry has been pushing “all plastic bottles” recycling programs and has been telling communities to collect it all and sort later. When I looked into this a few years ago, the rationale they gave was that they did not have sufficient reclamation, in other words the demand for post-consumer material to be recycled exceeded the amount actually being dropped in the recycling bins. They frankly admitted that only #1 and #2 plastic really gets recycled, but they argued that consumers end up throwing away recycleable plastic because they are confused and don’t want to sort. There has been some progress as shown by Patagonia’s campaign to start recycling their polypropylene (#5, PP) underwear, but generally speaking, not that much has changed in terms of what we can actually recycle. Furthermore, plastics are almost always “downcycled” meaning that they are made into materials other than what they started with. Unlike aluminum which can be recycled in a near infinite loop from aluminum can into aluminum can, plastic bottles get cycled into some other type of plastic product which is typically not itself recyclable.
As for the argument that consumers are confused (or apathetic), looking at the average public wastebasket or recycling bin, it’s clear that it’s true. Most trash bins are full of perfectly good plastic, not to mention aluminum and there’s not much confusion there. Basically, a lot of people just can’t be bothered and that’s probably the real reason. If you look in the average recycling bin, it’s full of garbage and materials that can’t be recycled, so confusion doesn’t seem to stop people from throwing whatever they feel like into recycling bins.
The chef’s comment got me thinking though that the whole thing is just a public relations campaign. People feel guilty when they throw something in the trash, but get this mild feeling of virtue when they put something in recycling as if the fact that they recycle something is the same as if they didn’t use it all. Few people stop to consider the energy and polution that might go into recycling something. Almost nobody asks whether or not everything their town collects for recycling actually gets recycled. And some people, like the local chef, think it’s wonderful that the town collects everything up to #7 plastic, and that’s bad.
First off, the numbers are not some sort of quality hierarchy, with quality getting lower and lower and maybe someday we’ll be able to recycle #8 and #9. The numbers are just code for the checmical used and they don’t relate in any particular way except that #1 is polyethylene (PET) which was the first plastic discovered. #7 just simply means “other” and is often a mixed resin, which means that with today’s technology there is virtually nothing you can do with #7 except bury it for 10,000 years. So just because the community collects it, doesn’t mean they don’t landfill it in the end. Meanwhile, #3, with the innocuous abbreviation “V” is none other than polyvinyl chloride, aka PVC, otherwise known as one of the most toxic substances known to manufacture and dispose of, producing dioxin and a cocktail of other polutants. Almost no matter how well PVC is recycled (and it is mostly not recycled), it is still better to avoid anything made with PVC in order to discourage its use and maufacture in the first place.
So this brings me back to the chef. All I can say is that his enthusiasm for the local recycling program which is “taking plastics all the way up to #7 for recycling” is troubling and makes me wonder if the plastics industry is merely trying to clean up its image instead of our landfills by making otherwise thoughtful people think that as long as it’s being thrown into the recylcing bins instead of the trash, it must not be that bad. Unfortunately, it actually is that bad, particularly #3 plastic, for which the post-consumer market in no way offsets the huge damage done by PVCs, and #7 which is an utter and total smokescreen since it has absolutely no recycling value at all.
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