U.S. households generate 51 million tons of plastic waste each year – but the vast majority of that plastic can't be recycled.
. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We are surrounded by plastic 24/7. It's in our Band-Aids, our cups at Joe2Go, the aglets on our shoelaces, you know, those little plastic things at the ends of the strings, even the speakers you're using to listen to this show right now. While a lot of those items are single-use, at least you can recycle them, right?Straws, zipper bags, plastic wrap, or cling wrap, bubble wrap, zip ties, bread on tortilla bags, those cannot be recycled either.
I grew up as an avid recycler. He had us take it to the nth degree. I can understand and have felt it myself, this eroding or wearing a way of a deeply felt ethos about what it meant to be a good person, a good citizen and that was dutifully even washing out the last scrap of peanut butter from the jar before putting it on curb.
We think of plastics as this monolith, but in reality, it's actually hundreds of different substances. That level of complexity is very difficult to sort and then to process into reusable materials. One other dimension to this is a design one. A more effective recycling system would have products that were designed with the end in mind and they weren't. That means we have multi-layered, multi-material products.
If you look at the industry documents themselves, they'll tell two stories. The public-facing story is that recycling is something we can all participate in to help move materials through the system and divert them from the landfill. The internal story is that there needs to be some evidence that this industry is putting forth its best effort to look like they're doing something about it to relieve some of the regulatory pressure.
Laura Sullivan from NPR actually dug up some of the records from an archives in Syracuse and went and got some of the former executives on the record saying, “Yes, we did put huge ad buys in to convince the public that recycling was going to solve the waste crisis that was evident in the ‘70s, and that has only accelerated since with plastics production going gangbusters just over the last two decades in particular.
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