Plastic Wars
I’ve taken the following words from a Frontline documentary I recently watched. A very sobering experience.
“It was the late 1980s, and the plastics industry was under fire.
Facing heightened public concern about ever-increasing amounts of garbage, the image of plastics was falling dramatically. State and local officials across the country were considering banning some kinds of plastics in an effort to reduce waste and pollution.
But the industry had a plan; a way to fend off plastic bans and keep its sales growing.
It would publicly promote recycling as the solution to the waste crisis — despite internal industry doubts, from almost the beginning, that widespread plastic recycling could ever be economically viable.
The strategy — and doubts — are revealed in Plastic Wars, an investigative documentary from FRONTLINE and NPR.
In the documentary, three top executives who represented the plastics industry in that pivotal era speak publicly for the first time, shedding new light on the industry’s efforts to overcome growing concern about plastic waste by pushing recycling.
“There was never an enthusiastic belief that recycling was ultimately going to work in a significant way,” Lewis Freeman, former VP of government affairs for what was then the industry’s chief lobbying group, the Society of the Plastics Industry, tells FRONTLINE and NPR in Plastic Wars."
The industry promoted recycling heavily anyway, counting on a simple strategy: “If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment,” says Larry Thomas, who formerly headed the SPI.”
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Notice the triangle on the front of these recycling bins.
They encourage you to believe the plastic bags you place in there are being reused. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Take single use plastic out of our lives. It’s the only way to deal with the immense damage that plastics are causing in our world.