Even a majority of Republicans support efforts to hold manufacturers accountable for allegedly deceptive claims
Concern about the fossil fuel and plastics industries’ alleged deception about recycling is growing, with new polling showing a majority of American voters, including 54% of Republicans, support legal efforts to hold the sectors accountable.
The industries have faced increasing scrutiny for their role in the global plastics pollution crisis, including an ongoing California investigation and dozens of suits filed over the last decade against consumer brands that sell plastics.
Research published earlier this year found that plastic producers have known for decades that plastic recycling is too cumbersome and expensive to ever become a feasible waste management solution, but promoted it to the public anyway.
Legislation on packaging should really be entertained as well. For many products a biodegradable form of packaging would be completely viable.
Impossible, the only appropriate package for our premium scissors is comparably premium clamshell plastic. That you need scissors to open.
Imagine if they sold can openers inside sealed tin cans… And not the kind with the pull tab.
All companies should be required to recycle their own products. No… not via contracts with 3rd parties. Products go back up through the sales channels untill they reach the manufacturers.
If you don’t have an idea how your products end of life works, you cannot sell or manufacture it.
Solves e-waste, plastic, chemicals… a lot of the god awful stuff.
Use to make machines for the plastic industry. None of them wanted tp use recycled plastic, because raw plastic pellets were cheaper and recycled plastic was harsher on the machines.
Recycled plastic is also terrible if you have any type of quality standards you have to meet. You generally end up creating even more scrap because the regrind always has some amount of contamination in it, and never performs the same as virgin.
Yep. When we made recycled units, the bearings got shredded and the drive motors got burnt out faster.
That’s why recycling goes after reduce and reuse.
Recycled plastic is also inferior quality with worse structural properties so it’s not really suitable for many applications.
Yep, regrind was bad.
Not saying anyone shouldn’t recycle. Just saying in our world of cheap is God, why fight?
We need to put some of these CEOs on trial like we did with the Nazi’s hopefully all of them will get their just punishment.
Put a per gram tax on every manufactured product and watch how companies magically find alternative materials/methods to make goods.
You mean: how they will raise prices to account for that.
“Most US voters say” AKA Not Gonna Happen.
Yeah we have a government that represents corporations.
I would sooner hold out local municipalities who run the recycling centers and our investigative news agencies for not clearly informing the public that recycling plastic has not been the ecological solution we’ve been promised.
I mean, sure, the plastic producers lied but the recyclers have known about it this entire time too. How this has been such a secret for decades may suggest some deeper conspiracy.
And, if it’s the case that our governments were genuinely unable to know this was an issue, we should be more critical of them for not knowing what other outside agencies are fooling them into using tax-payer dollars against our best interests.
That has to do with fuckery around the term recycling. What normal people have been led to believe is only a very narrow definition of recycling and not what happens in most cases. Burning plastic is considered recycling as the waste is recycled into fuel.
Same with renewable energy… sure the trees you chip down and burn can be regrown… but that is not what people are led to believe is what they are being sold.
This is not on the local municipalities. They where saddled with waste and had to deal with it, they did as good as they could. And many people have been yelling about this since before 2000… It was just ignored untill microplastic where found in the balls and brain.
This along with big oil needs to be dragged infront of a tribunal and higher-ups from the last 40 years need to be held to account. We have room in the Hague.
They where saddled with waste and had to deal with it, they did as good as they could.
FOR FORTY YEARS?!
Seattle doesn’t even accept plastics for recycling, only certain things for cleaning and reuse. They could do a better job in informing the public about it, though, since all of the products still stamp on the recycling symbols, most of which have never been actually recycled.
Also, decades of telling people to separate plastics for recycling into separate plastic types, like lids separate from bottles, undermines reuse because the bottles then get crushed without the lid to keep air inside. And crushing usually damages them too much to be cleaned and reused.
Yeah. Our city published the recycling restrictions on their website but people still put out stuff that’s not able to be recycled. Specifically, wet or greasy cardboard. They should send out flyers every year.
And they should educate in schools like they did in the 80s/90s when I was a kid, but give the real information. But without the plastics companies paying for that, it’s unlikely. Schools barely have enough money for the basics.
Spokane burns its ordinary trash. It also accepts plastics and other “recyclables” at an every-other-week curbside pick-up, using a separate bin, just as you’d expect. Then they burn it. Yes, just like the trash. But wait, they do the burning at a facility they call the “Waste To Energy” plant, so that makes it all OK.
It’s all a big expensive greenwashing game, but everyone seems perfectly fine with it. La di da di da.
Well, I mean the recycling bins in most cities just gets put in landfills. It used to get shipped to China and put in landfills there, but China stopped taking it now that they don’t have room for it and finally admitted plastic companies were lying about recycling it after lots of investigative reports.
Reuse is best but they really need to educate people and start actually fining people for putting the wrong stuff in the wrong bins if they do it repeatedly. Also, composting should be more widespread in larger areas to reduce waste.
But the biggest problem with burning the garbage is that they don’t properly collect the fumes. It’s expensive to do and would basically negate the income on the electricity produced. Some countries do it right and if done properly and if they are able to do it a lot, then it can be good. But Spokane is like the worst place to do it if you’re not collecting the fumes properly considering the climate and wildfire smoke that is already choking everyone all across the state and beyond. And plastic fumes are especially deadly for people with asthma, not to mention cancer causing. But a lot of cities still allow people to burn their own garbage and so many people burn plastics when they do. It’s horrible.
Ah yes, the fumes. That “Waste To Energy” incinerator is west of town in the area known as “West Plains”, near I90, near the airport, and not far from Fairchild AFB which these days is a locus of refueling operations and other support functions. Huge, 4-engined planes coming and going all day long. Long ago the AF firefighting ops polluted the groundwater there with PFAS chemicals and much of it is no longer fit to drink. Between that, the air pollution from military and civil air operations, and whatever comes out of the stacks at the W2E plant, I have to imagine the denizens of the area have evolved some powerful pollution-resistant genetics. Or maybe they just die young from cancer and respiratory and neurological diseases. Fortunately it’s a pretty low-income zone (think ‘typical military town’ - old skool Bremerton-ish) so all that disease can just be blamed on personal poor decision-making (like the decision to live there). A shame really, West Plains now has a ginormous Amazon warehouse that the residents could slave at (in addition to the super-Wally’s and the casinos) if they’d Just Say No to cancer and all those other tempting diseases.
Significantly reducing our reliance on plastics cannot be taken on as a single issue or at the local or even national level.
Plastics are a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry.
That’s the only reason materials which were marketed to people as miraculous in the 40s, 50s and 60s are so cheap.
The extraction industry is global, and the production of plastics is as well.
Even if one nation reduced its fossil fuel and plastic consumption significantly, there will be other nations that will take the opportunity to get that cheap energy, materials and industry.
Global solutions are nice to ask for, but not forthcoming. We can start by investing in alternatives at the local/national level, encouraging others to do the same, and advocating to grow an alternative way of living that is less extractive and more respectful. Ideas can spread quite quickly, if the conditions are right. A global switch isn’t possible immediately. Infrastructure must be planned. International economic planning and international cooperation are low right now. Even intranational cooperation is low.
Cooperation grows from the bottom up, and we need to find something locally/nationally to agree on and cooperate over. Plastics and recycling being a unifying issue is hopeful to report, and is something that can be tackled at the local level. I have greatly reduced my own plastic consumption (it’s not zero) and saved money doing it. Plastic products are usually expensive conveniences. Now I spend my days cleaning instead of just tossing and moving on. A part of the problem is that living well requires labor, and our society forces us to sell all of our labor energy to make a boss rich and pay us pennies. Further, we all live in atomized, nuclear units that must be self-reliant, which requires more labor to meet needs compared to the economies of scale involved with community-pooled labor to meet shared needs like food (a major source of plastics waste).
Previously, western society supported this structure via sexual segregation where one sex provided the labor to live well, and the other provided the labor donated to capitalism in exchange for the family unit being allowed to live. Then, the sex whose job it was to help us live well realized that they were being oppressed in this scenario, since they were being denied many basic rights of citizenship such as being seen as a person by society. They were tricked by the capitalists to demand that they may also donate their labor to the invisible hand in exchange for something closer to full citizenship. This creates a domestic labor vacuum that prevents pay parity. Domestic labor needs are being suppressed by convenience plastic use. The need for someone to do domestic labor causes women to fall back into this role due to the structural vacuum. Convenience plastics use is required to support the lack of time available now that Bosses demand double the labor from each family unit compared to the 1960s. Dropping plastics increases domestic labor requirements which exacerbates the sexual labor vacuum and pay gap. I see a local/national need to fix sexual issues as blocking a fix for our plastics addiction in the west. Abstracting the problematic societal structures around sex, calling them gender, and then breaking their rules is the current strategy to free ourselves.
I disagree, but this is a cool reply and you should keep posting like this.
Plastic recycling is a farce to make it appear as a “personal responsibility” issue.
Notice also how the labeling for plastics uses a sign that looks remarkably similar to a recycling logo - whether that specific type of plastic is actually recyclable or not.
It is all a public relation campaign, because fundamentally plastic is unsustainable and harmful. Governments have collectively shat the bed by placing the burden of dealing with plastic on the consumer. (This is very similar to the “carbon footprint” idea - which was a creation of the oil industry.)
I toured the place where my city collects its plastic recycling - the director in charge was very open about the fact that most of it isn’t used and can’t really be used anyway.
I mean, i get it, recycled plastic is harder to handle, etc. etc. But burning them for energy is no business?
In think plastic recycling is true and makes sense to do. I do it every week. However, all the plastic users need to act to limit it’s use to functionality based requirements…can anything at all be used instead of plastic in this situation??? There’s like 0 need to use plastic to box and ship things. Are you shipping an optic? Glass? A large flat TV? Okay there you should use plastics. Those plastics could be reusable first but also recyclable and the people selling the TV should be responsible for paying for the packaging to eventually get recycled. A watermelon 🍉 is way more fragile than a TV and we don’t box those things. Only Costco has the brains to box fruit individually. That’s just a waste.
