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Plastics Recycling Isn’t a Lie, It’s the Future - my response to the @frontlinepbs @NPR doc ‘Plastic Wars.’ https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2020-09-19/don-t-give-up-on-recycling-plastic @bopinion
One thing I’d like to add - Plastic Wars condemns the plastic industry for not having a recycling plan - or hope - for its products in 1974. But let’s be serious - what product had a recycling plan in 1974?
Times change, and so does chemistry. The fact that plastic manufacturers couldn’t figure out how to make a more sustainable product in 1974 was not - and is not - a permanent state. Incentive$ change; innovation happens.
recycling is now the biggest - as in as much as $60 billion annually - opportunity in plastics. Innovators from within and outside the industry are rushing to take advantage.
One final point - the idea that plastics have never been recyclable is a false one. As I reported and wrote in 2013, China was long home to a multi-billion dollar plastics recycling industry comprised of thousands of companies. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-recycles-plastic/
As far back as 2009, I personally witnessed recycled plastics manufactured for parts used by some of the world’s biggest electronics companies, from American consumer waste. The problem wasn’t technology. The problem was safety and environmental damage.
But here’s the hard fact that many environmentalists don’t want to accept - when you drop a plastic bottle into a bin, it goes into an industrial process, not some imaginary Green Heaven full of happy sustainable greeting cards.
Even the cleanest recycling company might shock the uninitiated with the reality of industrial production. That will never, ever change.
In any case, certainly the industry can, should and will do better. Hopefully so will journalists who set up false narratives about what can be done today based upon incomplete narratives that start in the 1970s.
