{"id":4687,"date":"2025-12-04T17:09:43","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T17:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/?p=4687"},"modified":"2025-12-04T17:09:44","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T17:09:44","slug":"how-recycling-has-become-a-largely-empty-gesture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/?p=4687","title":{"rendered":"How Recycling Has Become a Largely Empty Gesture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Yves here. This article describes how the good intentions of the push for more recycling have gone awry. The causes are many, but particularly prominent are lack of clear guidance to consumers on what is worth recycling and poor consumer and trash hauler compliance. People in my old building would regularly put general garbage in the recycling bins. Of course, they may have heard the probably accurate rumor that the contents of the recycling containers were tossed in with the garbage when the Sanitation Department trucks arrived.<\/p>\n<p>This piece shows how the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.<\/p>\n<p>By Kate Yoder. Originally published at Grist; cross posted from Yale Climate Connections<\/p>\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">t\u2019s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She\u2019s distraught about the state of the environment. \u201cIt\u2019s crazy what we\u2019re doing. It\u2019s very, very, very bad,\u201d she says in ABC\u2019s prime-time Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.<\/p>\n<p>The bartender, Kevin Costner, says he used to be scared, too \u2014 until he started doing something about it. \u201cThese?\u201d he says, holding up a soda can. \u201cI recycle these.\u201d As Streep prepares to launch her beer can into the recycling bin, Costner cautions her, \u201cThis could change your life.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Recycling, once considered the domain of people with \u201clong hair, granny glasses, and tie-dyed Ts,\u201d as the Chicago Tribune described it at the time, was about to go mainstream. The iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol, invented 20 years earlier, was everywhere in the early 1990s. Its tight spiral of folded arrows seemed to promise that discarded glass bottles and yellowing newspapers had a bright future, where they could be reborn in a cycle that stretched to infinity. As curbside pickup programs spread across the United States, the practice of sorting your trash would become, for many, as routine as brushing your teeth \u2014 an everyday habit that made you feel a little more responsible.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the recycling icon is omnipresent \u2014 found on plastic bottles, cereal boxes, and bins loitering alongside curbs across the country. The chasing arrows, though, are often plastered on products that aren\u2019t recyclable at all, particularly products made of plastic, like dog chew toys and inflatable swim rings. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency said that the symbol\u2019s use on many plastic products was \u201cdeceptive.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Recycling rules can be downright mystifying. For years, people were told pizza boxes were too greasy to be recycled, but now many recycling centers accept them. Some cities accept juice boxes lined with invisible layers of aluminum and plastic; others don\u2019t. And do the screw-on caps stay on plastic bottles or not? Recycling experts ask people to do a \u201clittle bit of homework\u201d to figure out what their local recycling system can handle, but since households have hundreds of items with different packaging to keep track of, that\u2019s asking a lot.<\/p>\n<p>The resulting confusion has made a mess of recycling efforts. Plastic wrap tangles around sorting equipment at recycling facilities, shutting down operations as employees try to cut it out of the equipment. Huge bales of paper shipped overseas can contain as much as 30 percent plastic waste. \u201cContamination is one of the biggest challenges facing the recycling industry,\u201d the EPA said in a statement to Grist. It takes time and money to haul, sort through, and dispose of all this unwanted refuse, which makes recycling more of a burden for city budgets. Many cities have ended up cutting costs by working with private waste companies; some don\u2019t even bother trying at all. About a quarter of Americans lack access to any recycling services.<\/p>\n<p>The difficulty of recycling plastic can make the chasing-arrows symbol near meaningless, with environmental groups calling plastic recycling a \u201cfalse solution.\u201d Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets shredded or melted down so that it can be used again. Much of the rest flows into landfills or gets incinerated, breaking down into tiny particles that can travel for thousands of miles and lodge themselves in your lungs. Plastics threaten \u201cnear-permanent contamination of the natural environment,\u201d according to one study, and pose a global health crisis, with plastic chemicals linked to preterm births, heart attacks, and cancer.<\/p>\n<p>So where did the three arrows go wrong? The trouble is that their loop has ensnared us. If some recycling is good, the thinking goes, then more recycling is better. That creates enormous pressure for packaging to be made recyclable and stamped with the arrows \u2014 regardless of whether trying to recycle a glass bottle or plastic yogurt container made much sense in the first place. David Allaway, a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, says that the facts just don\u2019t support the recycling symbol\u2019s reputation as a badge of environmental goodness. \u201cThe magnetic, gravitational power of recycling,\u201d he said, has led \u201cpolicymakers and the public to just talk more and more and more about recycling, and less and less and less about anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the spring of 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans \u2014 10 percent of the population \u2014 showed up for the first Earth Day, taking part in rallies, marches, and teach-ins, calling for clean air and clean water. Pollution had pushed its way into the national conversation. The year before, oil-soaked debris had caught fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, sending flames towering five stories high, and a drilling accident in Santa Barbara had spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of water. Smog regularly clouded skies from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, dimming cities in the middle of the day.<\/p>\n<p>The idea of recycling seemingly burst onto the scene in 1970. Earth Day organizers educated people about the value of sorting through their trash and advocated for community recycling programs. People would gather up their bottles and cans in plastic crates and bags and drive to designated sites to drop them off, sometimes earning a few bucks in return. \u201cThe environmental crisis has come into the public consciousness so recently that the word \u2018recycle\u2019 doesn\u2019t even appear in most dictionaries,\u201d the environmentalist Garrett De Bell wrote a couple weeks before the Earth Day event. He pitted recycling as \u201cthe only ecologically sensible long-term solution\u201d for a country \u201cknee-deep in garbage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t long before the concept acquired its signature symbol. At the time, Gary Anderson was finishing up his master\u2019s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California. He came across a poster advertising a contest to design a symbol for recycling, sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, a maker of cardboard boxes. Inspired by M.C. Escher\u2019s M\u00f6bius strip, Anderson spent just a couple of days coming up with designs using the now-famous trio of folded, rotating arrows. The simplest of his designs won, and Anderson was awarded a $2,500 scholarship in 1970. The Container Corporation quickly put the logo in the public domain, hoping it would be adopted on all recycled or recyclable products in order to \u201cspread awareness among concerned citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The M\u00f6bius loop he created soon passed from his mind. \u201cI just didn\u2019t really think of the symbol that much,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t used very much in the first couple of years.\u201d One day several years later, however, Anderson was wandering through the streets of Amsterdam in the haze of jet lag when he came across a row of oversized bins emblazoned with a beach ball-sized version of his logo. The Netherlands, purportedly, was the first country to launch a nationwide recycling program in 1972. \u201cIt just really shocked me into a realization that there must be something about this symbol,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>An early draft of the recycling symbol, sent in a letter designer Gary Anderson wrote to his mother. \u201cThis is the closest thing I have to a preliminary sketch,\u201d Anderson said. The original sketch, made used only drafting instruments, was destroyed in a fire in Anderson\u2019s garage. Courtesy of Gary Anderson<\/p>\n<div id=\"id_102797\" class=\"newspack-popup-container newspack-popup newspack-inline-popup\" tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\" data-segments=\"14345\" data-frequency=\"0,0,0,month\">\n<p>The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Refashioning old materials into new things is a longstanding American tradition. Paul Revere, folk hero of the American Revolution, collected scrap metal and turned it into horseshoes. In the 19th century, used rags were turned into paper, and families stitched together scraps of fabric to create quilts. The desperation of the Great Depression taught people to make underwear out of cotton flour sacks, and the propaganda posters of World War II positioned recycling as a patriotic duty: \u201cPrepare your tin cans for war.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,\u201d said Jackie Nu\u00f1ez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. \u201cWe had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>One of the first lessons of \u201cthrowaway society\u201d came in the 1920s, when White Castle became the first fast-food restaurant to sell its burgers in single-use bags, advertising them as clean and convenient. \u201cBuy \u2019em by the sack,\u201d the slogan went. In 1935, the big breweries that survived the Prohibition era started shipping beer in lighter, cheaper-to-transport steel cans instead of returnable glass bottles. Coca-Cola and other soda companies eventually followed suit.<\/p>\n<p>All those paper sacks and cans soon littered the sides of American roadways, and people started calling on the companies that created the waste to clean it up. Corporations responded by creating the first anti-litter organization, Keep America Beautiful, founded in 1953 by the American Can Company and the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. Keep America Beautiful\u2019s advertisements in the 1960s looked like public service announcements, but they subtly shifted the blame for all the garbage to individuals. Some featured \u201cSusan Spotless,\u201d a girl in a white dress who would wag her finger at anyone who soiled public spaces with their litter.<\/p>\n<p>The pressure on American businesses didn\u2019t go away, though. On the Sunday after Earth Day in April 1970, some 1,500 protesters showed up at Coca-Cola\u2019s headquarters in Atlanta to dump hundreds of cans and glass bottles at its entrance. Two years later, Oregon passed the country\u2019s first \u201cbottle bill\u201d requiring a 5-cent deposit on bottles and cans sold in the state, incentivizing people to return them, while Congress was considering banning single-use beverage containers altogether. Manufacturers successfully lobbied against a federal ban, arguing that jobs would be lost, as the historian Bartow J. Elmore recounts in the book Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. But corporations still wanted to relieve the public pressure on them and outsource the costs of dealing with the waste they were creating. Luckily for them, recycling was in vogue.<\/p>\n<p>In New York City, the war on waste was spearheaded by the Environmental Action Coalition, an organization raising funds for its \u201cTrash Is Cash\u201d community recycling program, with the long-term goal of getting recyclables picked up by city workers outside homes. Curbside recycling seemed to serve everyone\u2019s interest: Environmentalists wanted to waste less, and companies could use it as an opportunity to shift the cost of dealing with waste onto city governments. Businessmen who volunteered with the Environmental Action Coalition solicited millions in donations from their colleagues in the 1970s, writing that recycling had \u201csubstantial promise\u201d to fend off any legislation to ban or tax single-use containers.<\/p>\n<p>The campaign was a deliberate attempt to divert attention from more meaningful solutions like bottle bills, yet environmental groups embraced it, according to Recycling Reconsidered, a 2012 book bySamantha MacBride, who worked in New York City\u2019s sanitation department for two decades. The New York City Council started its mandatory curbside pickup program in the late 1980s, several years after the first one began in Woodbury, New Jersey, requiring residents to set out their paper, metal, glass, and some types of plastic in bins at the curb. The idea picked up in cities across the country, with the number of curbside programs growing from 1,000 to 5,000 between 1988 and 1992, spreading the chasing arrows along with them.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was in the late \u201980s and early \u201990s that this thing just becomes everywhere,\u201d said Finis Dunaway, a professor of history at Trent University in Canada. America was running out of places to put its trash, a dilemma captured by the story of a nomadic garbage barge in 1987. In March of that year, a barge teeming with 6 million pounds of trash left Long Island, New York, looking to unload its freight where the landfills weren\u2019t already full. States from North Carolina to Louisiana turned it away, and the barge spent months traveling around the Atlantic coast \u2014 all the way to Mexico, Belize, and the Bahamas \u2014 looking for a place to dispose of the garbage.<\/p>\n<p>In October, the barge made its way back to Brooklyn, where a court ordered that its contents be incinerated \u2014 but not before Greenpeace activists hung a giant banner on the boat: \u201cNEXT TIME \u2026 TRY RECYCLING.\u201d Annie Leonard, the former executive director of Greenpeace, told PBS Frontline in 2020 that she wonders whether that banner was a mistake. \u201cI think we were overly optimistic about the potential of recycling,\u201d she said, \u201cand perpetuating that narrative led us astray.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s an iconic scene in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which Dustin Hoffman\u2019s character, Benjamin Braddock, gets cornered at his college graduation party by one of his parents\u2019 friends. \u201cI just want to say one word to you, just one word: plastics,\u201d the older man says. \u201cThere\u2019s a great future in plastics. Think about it.\u201d One generation\u2019s earnest advice for a successful career clashed with a new, skeptical attitude toward plastic, which had already become a byword for \u201cfake.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>By the early 1970s, scientists had learned that whales, turtles, and other marine life were getting tangled up in plastic debris, a problem that was killing 40,000 seals a year. They knew, too, that small plastic fragments were making their way into the ocean, and that plastic residues had entered people\u2019s bloodstreams, presenting what an official from President Richard Nixon\u2019s Council of Environmental Quality deemed a significant health threat, \u201cpotentially our next bad one.\u201d The more people learned, the more plastic\u2019s reputation transformed from all-purpose, indestructible wonder into something that maybe shouldn\u2019t be trusted in your new microwave. Between 1988 and 1989, the percentage of Americans who believed plastic was damaging the environment rose from 56 to 72 percent. Larry Thomas, the president of the Society of Plastics Industry, warned in an internal memo that companies were starting to lose business, writing, \u201cWe are approaching a point of no return.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Beverage companies and the oil industry hoped to advertise their way out of the PR problem, laying out plans to spend $50 million a year to tout the polymer\u2019s virtues with slogans like \u201cplastics make it possible.\u201d They also turned to recycling. Lewis Freeman, the former vice president of government affairs at the Society of the Plastics Industry, an industry group, told Grist that he has a vivid memory of a colleague coming into his office, saying, \u201cWe\u2019ve got to do something to help the recyclers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Freeman tasked the Plastic Bottle Institute \u2014 made up of oil giants like BP and Exxon, chemical companies, and can manufacturers \u2014 with figuring out how to clarify to recycling sorters what kind of plastic was what. In 1988, they came up with the plastic resin code, the numbering system from 1 to 7 that\u2019s still in place.<\/p>\n<p>Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET (1), is used to make soft drink bottles; high-density polyethylene (2) is used for milk jugs; polyvinyl chloride (3) is used for PVC pipes in plumbing, and so on all through 7, the catch-all category for acrylic, polycarbonate, fiberglass, and other plastics. The Plastic Bottle Institute surrounded these numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the public the impression that they could throw all kinds of plastics into recycling bins, whether there was infrastructure to process them or not. The Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation warned that the confusion it would cause \u201cwill have a severe impact on the already marginal economic feasibility of recycling plastics as well as on recycling programs as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Once the symbol was operational, Freeman said, \u201cthen everybody started putting it on everything.\u201d Companies worked to make it official: Starting in 1989, the Plastic Bottle Institute lobbied for state laws mandating that the code numbers appear on plastic products. Their express purpose was to fend off anti-plastic legislation, according to documents uncovered by the Center for Climate Integrity. The laws eventually passed in 39 states.<\/p>\n<p>By the mid-1990s, the campaign to \u201ceducate\u201d the public about plastic recycling had succeeded: Americans had a more favorable opinion of plastic, and efforts to ban or restrict production had died down. But recycling rates \u2014 the share of materials that actually get reprocessed \u2014 had barely improved. Instead, the United States started exporting plastic waste to China, where turning old plastic into new materials helped meet growing demand from manufacturers. Polling conducted for the American Plastics Council in 1997 showed that people who worked in waste management were losing hope that plastics could be recycled, while the public, journalists, and government officials believed they could be recycled at unrealistically high rates.<\/p>\n<p>The problem was, fulfilling what companies called the \u201cthe urgent need to recycle\u201d wasn\u2019t as easy as the advertisements made it look. For decades, industry insiders expressed serious doubts that recycling plastic would ever be profitable, with one calling the economic case \u201cvirtually hopeless\u201d in 1969. There are thousands of plastic products, and they all need to be sorted and put through different processes to be turned into something new. The way packaging is molded \u2014 blown, extruded, or stamped \u2014 means that even the same types of plastic can have their own melting points. A PET bottle can\u2019t be recycled with the clear PET packaging that encases berries. A clear PET bottle can\u2019t be recycled with a green one.<\/p>\n<p>The plastics that do happen to get sorted and processed can only be \u201cdowncycled,\u201d since melting them degrades their quality. Recycled plastic, it turns out, is more toxic than virgin plastic, liable to leach dangerous chemicals, so it can\u2019t safely be turned into food-grade packaging. It\u2019s also more expensive to produce. The result of this morass is that there is virtually no market for recycled plastics beyond those marked with 1s and 2s; the rest are incinerated or sent to landfills. Only 9 percent of the plastics ever produced have gone on to be recycled.<\/p>\n<p>As plastic waste piled up and public frustration mounted, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition \u2014 backed by corporate giants including Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, and Exxon Mobil \u2014 launched a bigger, more specific recycling initiative in 2008 called \u201cHow2Recycle.\u201d\u00a0 It came with new labels that appeared to provide clarity about which elements of a product could be recycled, distinguishing between plastic wrap and coated trays, sometimes qualifying the recycling logo with \u201cstore drop-off\u201d labels for plastic bags and film.<\/p>\n<p>But environmental advocates say that the How2Recycle labels, used by more than a third of the companies that package consumer goods, may be even more misleading than the resin code. For example, plastic yogurt containers made of polypropylene, number 5s, are considered \u201cwidely recyclable\u201d under the system, yet only 3 percent of all the polypropylene containers produced actually get recycled.<\/p>\n<p>The plastic resin code with the chasing arrows certainly confused people \u2014 68 percent of Americans surveyed in 2019said they thought anything labeled with the code could be recycled. But the How2Recycle labels \u201cput the lies on steroids,\u201d said Jan Dell, the founder of the nonprofit The Last Beach Cleanup. It\u2019s not just a tiny triangular indent on the bottom of a container anymore, but a large, high-contrast recycling logo that \u201cstares you in the face.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Given the dismal state of plastic recycling, it might seem like the best thing to do is throw the chasing arrows in the garbage. But not all recycling is a failure. \u201cMetals are the true success story,\u201d said Carl Zimring, a waste historian at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. As much as three-quarters of all the aluminum that\u2019s ever been produced is still in use, he said. Paper is also relatively easy to process, with more than two-thirds making its way into new products in the U.S. Even for a recycling standby like glass, though, less than a third gets broken down into fragments for new jars and bottles.<\/p>\n<p>The recycling logo still gives anything it touches \u2014 whether feasible to recycle or not \u2014 a green aura. Surveys show that a majority of Americans believe recycling is one of the most effective ways they can fight climate change, when experts say it\u2019s unlikely to make much of a difference in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That\u2019s a credit to the iconic triangle, which has had 50 years to entrench itself in our culture. \u201cIt\u2019s easy to bash on the image, or bash on corporations, without seeing this as something that is very powerful,\u201d said Dunaway, the environmental historian. So is there a way to give the recycling symbol meaning again?<\/p>\n<p>When recycling started taking off in the early 1990s, there was no definitive, agreed-upon definition of what it meant. \u201cAnything is recyclable, at least theoretically,\u201d one lawyer pointed out in a legal journal in 1991. The effort to impose some sort of order came from California, often the national laboratory for environmental protection. The state passed the country\u2019s first restrictions on green claims in 1990, prohibiting advertisers from using terms like \u201cozone-friendly\u201d and \u201crecyclable\u201d on items that didn\u2019t meet its standards (though that stipulation didn\u2019t survive a challenge in court).<\/p>\n<p>Wider efforts to restrict the symbol, however, lacked strength and enforcement. In 1992, the Federal Trade Commission told advertisers they could call a product \u201crecyclable\u201d even if only 1 percent of their product was recycled. Not much else happened on that front until 2013, when the group that administers the plastic resin code, ASTM International, announced that it was replacing the chasing arrows with a solid triangle to reduce public confusion. It didn\u2019t require manufacturers to rework their labels, though.<\/p>\n<p>Today, that might finally be changing. When China banned the import of most plastics in 2018, it revealed problems that had long remained hidden. The United States had been shipping 70 percent of its plastic waste to China \u2014 1.2 billion pounds in 2017 alone. States set about finding ways to fix the recycling system, with some focusing on the confusion generated by the symbol itself. In 2021, California \u2014 the world\u2019s fifth-largest economy \u2014 passed a \u201ctruth in labeling\u201d law prohibiting the use of the chasing arrows on items that are rarely recycled. To pass the test, 60 percent of Californians need to have access to a processing center that sorts a given material; on top of that, 60 percent of processors have to have access to a facility that will remanufacture the material into something else.<\/p>\n<p>Though the bill faced opposition from companies right until it passed, the idea resonated with legislators, said Nick Lapis, the director of advocacy at Californians Against Waste. \u201cIt was pretty easy to understand that putting the chasing arrows symbol on a product that is not ever going to get recycled is not fair to consumers. Like, it just made so much intuitive sense that I think it kind of went beyond the lobbyist politics of Sacramento.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Across the country, public officials in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, and Washington state are considering similar legislation. This spring, Maine passed a law to incentivize companies to use accurate recycling labels on their packaging. New rules around the recycling logo are also brewing at the national level. Last April, Jennie Romer, the EPA\u2019s deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention, called for the FTC to put an end to the \u201cdeceptive\u201d use of the iconic chasing arrows on plastics in its upcoming revisions to the Green Guides for environmental marketing claims. \u201cThere\u2019s a big opportunity for the Federal Trade Commission to make those updates to really set a high bar for what can be marketed as recyclable,\u201d Romer told Grist. \u201cBecause that symbol, or marketing something as recyclable, is very valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Once California\u2019s law goes into effect next year, state laws will clash with each other, since many states still require the resin numbers on plastic packaging. \u201cThe question on everyone\u2019s mind is, who\u2019s going to win out?\u201d said Allaway, the Oregon official.<\/p>\n<p>Talk of truth-in-labeling legislation has coincided with another trend \u2014 states trying to turn the costs for dealing with waste back on the manufacturers that produced it. Laws requiring \u201cextended producer responsibility,\u201d or EPR, for packaging have already been approved in Maine, Oregon, California, and Colorado. It\u2019s already led to problems in California, since the EPR bill refers to the state\u2019s truth-in-labeling law to determine which materials can be recycled, creating incentives for everything to be labeled as recyclable, Dell said.<\/p>\n<p>Even if the Federal Trade Commission updates the Green Guides to prohibit the deceptive use of the recycling symbol, it doesn\u2019t change the fact that the guides are just suggestions. They don\u2019t carry the weight of law. \u201cThe FTC itself has never enforced a false recyclable label, ever, ever, on plastics, not once,\u201d Dell said. One of Dell\u2019s favorite metaphors: \u201cIt\u2019s the wild, wild West of product claims and labeling, with no sheriff in town.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So Dell has appointed herself de facto sheriff, suing companies over their false claims. In 2021, her organization reached a settlement with TerraCycle, Coca-Cola, Procter &amp; Gamble, and six other companies that agreed to change labels on their products. Dell recently filed a shareholder proposal with Kraft Heinz in an attempt to force it to remove recyclability claims from marshmallow bags and mac-and-cheese bowls destined for the landfill.<\/p>\n<p>Another promising legal push is coming from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has been investigating fossil fuel and chemical companies for what he called \u201can aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis.\u201d Despite mounting awareness of plastic\u2019s threat to public health, oil and chemical companies around the world make 400 million metric tons of the polymer every year, and production is on track to triple by 2060. It\u2019s the oil industry\u2019s backup business plan in the expectation that wealthy countries will shift away from gasoline in an effort to tackle climate change, since petroleum is the basic building block of plastics. Exxon Mobil, the world\u2019s third-largest oil producer, ranks as the top plastic polymer producer.<\/p>\n<p>Stricter enforcement around the use of the chasing arrows could lead to more accurate labels, less public confusion, and better outcomes for recycling centers. But it\u2019s worth asking whether more recycling should even be the goal, rather than solutions that are much better for the environment, like reducing, reusing, refilling, and repairing. As Anderson, the symbol\u2019s inventor, says, \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s really fair to blame a graphic symbol for all of our lack of initiative in trying to do better.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<div class=\"printfriendly pf-alignleft\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border:none;-webkit-box-shadow:none; -moz-box-shadow: none; box-shadow:none; padding:0; margin:0\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.printfriendly.com\/buttons\/print-button-gray.png\" alt=\"Print Friendly, PDF &amp; Email\"\/><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nakedcapitalism.com\/2024\/06\/how-recycling-has-become-a-largely-empty-gesture.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yves here. This article describes how the good intentions of the push for more recycling have gone awry. The causes are many, but particularly prominent are lack of clear guidance to consumers on what is worth recycling and poor consumer and trash hauler compliance. People in my old building would regularly put general garbage in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-berita-internasional","category-berita-dalam-negeri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11308,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4687\/revisions\/11308"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uang69.id\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}