Recycling’s a Fraud! says MSM. Who Knew?
Green crusaders trying to ‘hold plastics companies accountable’ for deception
Frontline News Staff, February 18, 2024
(https://frontline.news/post/recycling-s-a-fraud-says-msm-who-knew)
Corporate lies?
“They lied” screams The Guardian. A terrible fraud has been perpetrated not only on the innocent, trusting public but also on their innocent, trusting governments. No one, apparently, had a clue that recycling plastic was not a viable solution to pollution. No one, that is, other than the plastic companies, who “knew for decades recycling was not viable, but promoted it regardless.”Now, however, the deception has been uncovered by a fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group that calls itself the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), in a 68-page report which details the “hopeless” policy of recycling plastic and calls plastic pollution “one of the most serious environmental crises facing the world today.”
Recycling plastic isn’t viable for a number of reasons. First of all, the process is expensive, much more so than producing plastic from scratch. And since only plastics of the same type can be recycled together, they have to be sorted first—and there are thousands of types. Most types aren’t recycled at all, as the resulting plastic is of such low quality that there’s no demand for it. And even for those few types that can be recycled, they can only endure the process a few times before they are so degraded that recycling leaches toxic materials. At the end of the day, just five percent of plastics are recycled.
Plastics under Pressure
Was this The Guardian’s big scoop? Not quite. Almost 30 years ago, journalist John Tierney, writing in the New York Times, made many of the same points. A few years before his article was published, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had come to the same conclusion, reporting in 1991, after a ten-year review, that “it appears that at the present, only two types [of plastic] could be considered for making into high quality objects.”
According to the CCI, however, the plastic industry had known way before then and resolved to hide the information due to “growing public backlash against public waste” and a need to address criticism amid “threats of regulation.”
An early solution proposed by the plastics companies was using plastic waste for landfill (burying it, not merely dumping it, in areas where land needed to be leveled out or raised). After all, plastics seemed ideal for the purpose, manufacturers reasoned, since they don’t biodegrade—“they just sit there.” But, the CCI claims, “people did not want more landfills.” They also “did not want incineration, and did not want plastic in the environment.” The plastics companies didn’t care; they “continued to increase plastic production, while carrying out a well-coordinated plan to deceive consumers, policymakers, and regulators about plastic recycling.”
Hold Them Accountable!
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, CCI president. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
The CCI doesn’t make it clear how this might happen, nor does it even allege that anyone broke the law, but one of the report’s co-authors has said that she suspects plastics companies violated “public-nuisance, racketeering, and consumer-fraud protections.” Given that the report stresses that “policymakers and regulators” were among those deceived,” it appears that the CCI would like to let government off the hook and make industry pay the price for selling products that people wanted to buy, despite the fact that governments have, for decades, been promoting and even mandating recycling, supposedly without ever taking the trouble to research whether it was an effective policy.
Assuming they the companies are brought to trial and convicted, what will have been achieved? “True accountability will put an end to the industry’s fraud of plastic recycling and open the door to real solutions to the plastic waste crisis that are currently out of reach,” claims the report.
Solutions?
The “sustainable waste management strategies” promoted by the CCI (which is partially funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund) all center around reducing new plastic production, even coercively, via “waste reduction, reuse, bans, alternative materials.” This reflects the attitude of organizations such as Greenpeace, whose oceans campaign director, John Hocevar, thinks that “if all of that throwaway plastic is going to end up coming back to poison us, maybe we should stop making it.”
What about landfill? Is it really such a bad idea? After all, plastic landfill is already being utilized to make ski hills, parks, and golf courses, using methods that guard against toxic substances leaching into the environment.
Furthermore, in his NYT article, Tierney quoted an economist who “calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side.”
Tierney then added that this “would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists.”