America Recycles Day Encouraged Recycling. It Was Sponsored by Companies That Produce a Ton of Plastic.

“I think we’ve taken convenience and just turned it into a monster.”

Large amounts of trash and plastic refuse collect in Ballona Creek after first major rain storm, Culver City, California, USA.Citizen of the Planet/Getty

This piece originally appeared in the Guardian and appears here as part of our Climate Desk Partnership.

America’s government-backed national recycling awareness day is being used as cover by large corporations that are churning out enormous volumes of plastic that end up strewn across landscapes, rivers and in the ocean, critics have said.

The America Recycles Day event on Friday is being vigorously promoted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a way to encourage Americans to recycle more.

But critics point out that the initiative is the brainchild of Keep America Beautiful, a not-for-profit founded and backed by large companies that produce vast quantities of plastic products that end up as pollution.

Current backers include Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pepsico, and Altria, the tobacco giant formerly known as Phillip Morris. Decades of campaigns by the group have emphasized individual responsibility for plastic recycling, which data reveals to be a largely broken system.

“Just like the fossil fuel industry, corporate polluters have been using recycling to justify ever-increasing production of single-use packaging, while taxpayers and cities are left to foot the bill,” said Denise Patel, the US and Canada program director of Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

“Lower-income communities and communities of color, who are the hardest hit and the least responsible, bear the brunt of a model that has brought us to the brink of the waste and climate crisis.”

A huge global expansion in plastic production is under way, threatening to sweep aside any effort to increase the current recycling rate of about 9 percent of all plastics. A 2017 analysis found that fossil fuel companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell have poured more than $180 billion into new facilities that form the raw material for everyday plastics from packaging to bottles, trays and cartons.

This boom is set to fuel a 40 percent rise in plastic production over the next decade, according to experts, exacerbating the plastic pollution crisis that scientists warn already risks “near permanent pollution of the Earth.”

The Trump administration is simultaneously supporting that expansion and promoting a flawed recycling system.

The EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, this week toured a recycling facility in Virginia and the agency is hosting an “innovation fair,” in addition to the summit on Friday.

Wheeler said the agency is “working diligently to identify market-based strategies and innovative ideas to create a more sustainable recycling system in America.”

An EPA spokesperson, asked to point to specific policies the agency is developing to bolster recycling, referred to a voluntary pledge that 45 corporations and government associations have signed. The signatories—which include the biggest plastic producers—have been divided into work groups that have each established a “vision statement, as well as challenges, opportunities and potential actions.”

The Trump administration is simultaneously supporting plastics growth and promoting a flawed recycling system, without enacting changes to fix it.

The problems that poses for consumers is on full display at one Washington DC organic grocery store that runs a program for customers to drop off hard-to-recycle waste.

Shaymah Ansari is in charge of environmental restoration efforts at the Mom’s Organic Market just off a busy highway headed out of the city. She spends hours each week sorting the waste people bring in to make sure it isn’t contaminated before sending it to recycling facilities.

Thousands of bottles and cans await pick-up from distributors at the Sure We Can non-profit redemption center in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York.

Richard B. Levine / Zuma

She sees it all – the Amazon bubble envelopes, the bread bags, the used toothbrushes—all the things local residents can’t recycle at home. She also sees optimistic recycling, or “wishcycling” of things that typically can’t be repurposed into new products. One day she found a Kenmore coffee maker.

“I think we’ve taken convenience and just turned it into a monster,” Ansari said.

Ansari sees people trying harder to responsibly dispose of their waste, only to find they often can’t. Many of the plastics they drop off – including bags for frozen food, coffee and lunch meat—end up in the trash.

Even when difficult-to-recycle plastics are repurposed, they are often downcycled into things like plastic benches and fuel and are rarely used to make the same products they came from.

Even if people properly sort and prepare their waste, most plastic never has a chance at getting recycled anyway. About 91 percent of plastic does not ultimately get recycled. Billions of tons still remain on the planet—from the oceans to the snow in the Arctic and the Alps.

Most of the plastic Americans try to recycle is sent overseas, where it is often landfilled or incinerated. And increasingly, plastics are burned in the US, polluting the air in mostly minority communities.

Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency official who has launched the Beyond Plastics project at Bennington College, said that means plastics “fundamentally are not recyclable.” She says companies making plastic are pushing personal responsibility instead of supporting new laws and taking accountability for a worldwide plastic crisis.

“Many of us go to the supermarket and try not to buy plastic,” Enck said. “It’s impossible, and it’s not our fault.”

Even if the broader global recycling system was functioning well, the US has another problem: Americans are terrible at sorting and recycling their waste. The country’s municipal recycling rate is 35 percent, according to a recent analysis—far lower than most developed nations.

Germany, the most efficient country, attempts to recycle 68 percent of its waste. Plastics producers in Germany are forced to take back the single-use bottles they make, collecting them in reverse vending machines at grocery stores. And communities are required to have extensive sorting systems.

People in the US say they care deeply about the planet, with 74 percent agreeing “the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment”, according to a Pew Research Center poll. But only 32 percent say it bothers them “a lot” when people throw away things that could be recycled.

Jessica Nolan, the director of the conservation psychology lab at the University of Scranton, said the US lags behind other countries because it lacks government policies that signal recycling is important.

“By putting laws in place that mandate recycling or incentivize recycling, what that tends to do psychologically is it increases peoples’ expectations that other people are going to participate,” Nolan said. “No one wants to be a sucker—nobody wants to be spending all this time and energy doing something if no one else is doing it.”

San Francisco, for example, instituted strong recycling policies more than a decade ago and reached an 80 percent recycling rate, Nolan said.

But some localities are scaling back their recycling programs, as China has begun to refuse recycling shipments from the US that are contaminated with food or the wrong kinds of plastics. In New Orleans, Louisiana, for example, the parish government will no longer accept plastic containers labeled 3 through 7, meaning they will go to a landfill.

Many activists argue that plastics recycling is so broken that humanity should return to a zero-waste economy, starting with food and beverage packaging. Metal, glass and paper should still be reused and recycled, they say, but single-use plastic should be largely phased out.

Even compostable plates and cups have raised alarms, both because some of them don’t actually biodegrade and because some include harmful chemicals.

Miriam Gordon, who works with companies to limit their waste at Upstream Solutions, said activists are up against “convenience culture.” Just decades ago, many households didn’t need their trash collected because they didn’t produce trash beyond food scraps, she said.

Berkeley, California, is piloting a program for reusable stainless steel cups at cafes, partnering with the company Vessel, which distributes, collects and cleans the cups

“If we are going to go back to reusables and refillables, we have to have a culture-changing strategy,” Gordon said.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate