When Is "Recyclable" Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means.

[sl8]

https://www.propublica.org/article/plastics-industry-redefine-recyclable-ftc-grocery-bags

When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means.

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on plastic shopping bags and other items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.

by Lisa Song
Aug. 15, 6 a.m. EDT

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators.

They argue that “recyclable” should apply to anything that’s capable of being recycled. And they point to newer technologies that have been able to remake plastic bags into new products.

I spent months investigating one of those technologies, a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis, only to find that it is largely a mirage. It’s inefficient, dirty and so limited in capacity that no one expects it to process meaningful amounts of plastic waste any time soon.

[...]

[Shermann]

1. Right because Resin Identification Codes (RIC's) aren't misleading enough

You don't actually use those codes to identify which items should go in your recycle bin, instead you go by vague rules like "no non-bottle plastics". RIC's are mostly useless greenwashing.

[gab13by13]

2. Only 6% of plastic bottles are recycled into another plastic bottle.

70% of every glass bottle is made from a recycled glass bottle.

When they say recyclable, they don't specify what that plastic bottle is recycled into. They are recycled into items that are not recyclable, like clothing and rugs that eventually end up in a landfill.

[erronis]

3. Good article in "Grist" referenced in the ProPublica story

https://grist.org/culture/recycling-symbol-logo-plastic-design/

It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.

The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too — until he started doing something about it. “These?” he says, holding up a soda can. “I recycle these.” As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, “This could change your life.”

Recycling, once considered the domain of people with “long hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,” as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth — an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.