Plastic pollution is a really serious problem. In the past we have told you about how the proliferation of products made from this material has resulted in the presence of micro- and nanoplastics, even inside the human body. One of the best strategies to stop this monster is recycling.
Unfortunately, a study published by the Center for Climate Integrity revealed a sad reality: all these decades of recycling efforts have been for nothing. According to the report, entitled The Plastic Recycling Fraud, the plastics industry has fed the illusion that, by separating their packaging, people are helping the planet. However, companies know that most of these materials are not recyclable on a large scale.
A promise broken from the start
In Canada alone, 5.7 million tons of plastic waste is produced every year. However, according to the National Inventory of Plastic Pollution Sources, more than half of this waste is mismanaged. Worldwide, only 9% of plastics are recycled. Despite this, the image of recycling has been strongly linked to plastic consumption since the late 1980s.
According to the report, a campaign has been waged in recent decades “to deceive the public about the feasibility of plastic recycling”. Davis Allen of the Center for Climate Integrity said that the industry never aimed to truly recycle, but rather “to make people believe it was working”.
The document backs up this claim with archive material, meeting notes and testimonies from former employees of bodies such as the American Chemistry Council. At a conference in 1989, for example, an industry leader admitted: “Recycling cannot continue indefinitely and does not solve the problem of solid waste”.
Recycling as a marketing strategy
For Allen, the plastics industry always presented recycling as an image problem , not as a technical challenge. Plastics, made from oil and gas, have a wide range of chemical variants that can rarely be recycled together. This makes the process costly and inefficient.
However, when the debate about banning certain plastic products began in some US cities in the 1980s, the industry opted to promote recycling campaigns as an apparent solution. Activists such as Jan Dell warn that companies are currently promoting a pro-recycling campaign and making promises about advanced technologies. However, Dell claims that “it’s the same process they were trying 30 years ago”.
The American Chemistry Council said in an interview that the report was “flawed” and “out of date” and that real efforts are being made to change the way plastic is manufactured and recycled. Despite these statements, the production of plastic-based objects is expected to triple by 2050, which has set off alarm bells worldwide.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
Although recycling can, to a certain extent, lead us to a sustainable future, the truth is that the real solution lies in manufacturing fewer plastic products, as this would slow down the proliferation of this material in the environment. In this sense, it is worth remembering the old slogan that we have all learned since we were young: “reduce, reuse and recycle”.
In practice, as we have already seen, advertising discourse has focused on recycling, despite the fact that this is a strategy that has yielded little fruit in the case of plastic pollution. If we add to this the fact that a large percentage of the population does not properly separate their waste, the problem becomes even more complicated.
