These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it. We've pioneered the country's largest, most comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."
"The bottle may look empty, yet it's anything but trash," says one ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic. It could be because that's not what they were told. But the public has known little about these difficulties. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. It's made from oil and gas, and it's almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.Īll of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice. Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome." "The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. "There is serious doubt that can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work - that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled - all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic. NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials.
#RECYCLE PLASTIC SERIES#
This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline that includes the documentary Plastic Wars, which aired March 31 on PBS. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. "I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. She sends the soda bottles to the state.īut when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.
She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. "To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon.
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