The latest salvo against the plastics industry is a movement to hold players responsible for allegedly deceptive recycling claims. This latest attack on plastics assumes that industry efforts to increase recycling capacity have been little more than lies and deception. Here is my take: the accountability push is a straw dog.
In case you don’t know, ‘straw dog’ is an idiom that describes something that’s used as a substitute for the real thing. It is tied to an ancient practice of using animals made of straw as sacrifices so as to protect living animals.
Claiming that the plastics industry is intentionally being deceptive about its recycling initiatives is a strong dog in the sense that is being used to disguise the fact that consumers have an insatiable appetite for plastic. The culture may think plastic is bad and needs to go but take it away and the average person is going to be terribly unhappy with the results.
The Alleged Deceit
A recent poll done by the Guardian demonstrates that a majority of American voters do not believe that plastic recycling works. An astonishing 70% would support legislation to hold the plastics industry accountable for its recycling claims. Doing so would allegedly stop the deception. My question is this: what deception?
A Guardian article discussing their polling data talks about the green arrows and numbering system we normally associate with plastic recycling. That system is supposedly deceptive because it allegedly fools consumers into thinking that throwing plastic into a recycling bin actually results in recycling.
The dirty little secret is that the system was not developed to promote recycling at all. The numbering system was created to help manufacturers easily identify the types of plastics they were dealing with. Furthermore, the plastics industry did not come up with the three-arrow symbol. That symbol was the creation of a private individual who entered an art contest sponsored by recycling advocates in honor of the first Earth Day.
Manufacturers Aren’t Saying Anything
Manufacturers are not saying anything about recycling by putting numbers and arrows on their products. The numbers designate the type of plastic while the recycling arrows suggest that the plastic could be recycled if someone wanted to do it. But manufacturers are not claiming that every piece of plastic thrown into a recycling bin actually gets recycled.
It’s the municipalities that have been saying it for so many years. It is the recycling advocates that have been pushing the lie. These same people are only stepping up now because the lie has been exposed. They are covering their own liability by pointing the finger at manufacturers.
Along those same lines is mass balancing. Mass balance accounting, a system that sustainability experts have relied on for years to account for things like organic agriculture and sustainable farming, suddenly doesn’t work when applied to plastics. Sustainability advocates accuse the plastics industry of being deceptive through the use of mass balancing even though they are fully behind the practice elsewhere.
Recycling Does Work
The frustrating thing about all of this is that plastic recycling does work if it is done the right way. Tennessee’s Seraphim Plastics proves it every single day. Seraphim and dozens of other plastic recyclers around the country have been successfully recycling industrial plastics, at a profit, for decades.
It’s true that post-consumer recycling doesn’t work. But that’s not the plastic industry’s fault. The blame for failed consumer recycling lies at the feet of both consumers and municipal recycling programs. To deflect the blame at plastics manufacturers and their alleged deception is nothing more than a straw dog sacrifice.
