Around the beginning of the 1990s, public opinion began to turn sharply against plastic. For the preceding several decades, litter had become a noticeable problem around the world's beaches and highway medians, and it was not a good look. Sensing potential backlash and scandal, the beverage and packaging industries—the source of all this plastic—responded with massive investment in recycling campaigns, and advertising to promote them. This seemingly upstanding reaction is rather curious considering that, as early as 1973, plastics industry magnates knew that plastic recycling would never be practically feasible on a massive scale, nor would it ever be economically profitable, with virgin plastic being much cheaper to produce. Since the EPA started collecting data in 1994, only 10% of all recyclable plastic ever produced has actually been reprocessed. Not despite but because of this, corporations like Dow, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron Phillips have heavily promoted recycling—and not with the goal of actually reprocessing more plastic, or even reducing the amount of waste reaching the landfills and oceans (if they really cared, they would decrease production or invest more heavily in recycling infrastructure), but rather to assuage consumption guilt and keep people using plastic without asking questions. In 2018, the plastics industry made over $400 billion in profits. Plastic production is on track to triple by 2050.

Sharon Lerner's deep dive for The Intercept tells the noxious history of the plastic industry's largely successful efforts to shift the responsibility and financial burden of plastic recycling onto the individual consumer, while diverting attention away from the source of the waste and blocking legislature (bottle bills, bag bans, single-use plastic bans) that would complicate their profit- and waste-maximizing practices.

It all seems to come down to selling single-use convenience to a global culture increasingly accustomed to it, while simultaneously alleviating its guilt through recycling education campaigns—pure non-profit-industrial complex greenwashing. The simple economics goes: so long as regulations remain insufficiently protective of the environment, and it costs more to sell recyclable plastic on the market, then waste management companies will bury or burn plastic, and corporations will keep producing plastic at increasing rates.

The solutions the industry proposes don’t actually solve anything. In fact, they weren’t designed to solve the waste problem, for they have a vested interest in that plastic being in oceans and landfills instead of crowding their packaging market. Promoting these false solutions fuels the problem by convincing people it's ok to continue using plastics.

For a while now, wherever I go, I've compulsively picked up trash. I try to imbue this simple, Sisyphean action that, on the smallest scale, helps clean up only my immediate surroundings, with political import, a sort of protest against the plastics industry—NOT against some industry-fabricated idea of a non-eco-conscious bad guy who threw a plastic cup out their car window, or against the recycling centers that make it so complicated and don’t even end up recycling much of what they receive, as they are legally restricted in what they can do with unrecyclable plastics (thanks to corporate lobbying). The individual litterer and the dysfunctional recycling center fall downstream of the origins of the issue, which are the corporations producing so much litterable shit, knowing full well that much of it will wind up in the ocean or in landfills, and not only doing it anyway out of greed, but actively misrepresenting the truth to shift away responsibility as public opinion turns ever more sharply against plastic. What's more, in a brilliant and nefarious twist, they construct a narrative in which they are the heroes of the global clean-up movement, when, even if successful in cleaning up their mess, their ulterior motive is always to cover up the visible traces of the immeasurable, unfixable environmental damage they have already done in order to secure future profits. Watch out for non-profits like Endplasticwaste.org, whose board is packed with major plastic industry execs, and whose mission does not include anything about reducing plastic usage, just getting it out of the environment, where it kills animals and makes humans feel bad... and maybe even consider using less plastic, which, of course, would be bad for business.

Recycling does not work nearly as well as we are led to believe by corporate misinformation campaigns. A global shift in consumer attitude away from convenience is crucial, but that attitude has to extend beyond the individual, and even the collective, practice of reducing plastic consumption to political and legislative action against the overproducers. People should feel bad about using plastic and recycling it, and that bad feeling should be channeled into holding corporations accountable. Perhaps one day this could become a global class-action lawsuit against Coca-Cola, Pepsi Co, Dow, DuPont, Exxon Mobil—all the plastic producers, who have made billions, where they all have to pay ecological reparations.

Until then, reduce, reuse, and organize.

Sources, and further reading/watching:

• Sharon Lerner for The Intercept: “How the plastics industry is fighting to keep polluting the world”

• Sharon Lerner for The Intercept: "Leaked Audio Reveals How Coca-Cola Undermines Plastic Recycling Efforts"

• Laura Sullivan for NPR: "How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled"

• PBS documentary (free, 54 minutes): Plastic Wars