Transcription
Is recycling a scam? I've seen it all over the internet, but "scam" is one of those clickbaity words on YouTube. YouTubers say everything's a scam: buying a home, 401ks, even shampoo. So, what's actually going on? Are those videos about recycling right? Is it a scam?
Now, let me clarify. They and I are mainly focusing on plastic recycling, although it's a debatable topic for all recycling. But we've been told our whole lives that we need to recycle our plastics. They don't degrade, they ruin the planet. The only guy questioning it was George Carlin. The Earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children.
Hey, I'm Kendle Court. In these videos, I try my best to balance the pros and cons of an issue, but in this case, the pro side really isn't defendable. The truth is, we've been lied to by a combination of the media, politicians, environmentalists, and the plastics industry. The recycling system we've been sold just doesn't work. It's a greenwashing campaign. Still, as always, if I've made any substantive mistakes here, I'll pin them in a comment below.
Let's take the facts and fictions surrounding plastic recycling. We'll start with why it's so hard to recycle plastic. Look at the history of plastic and how we got here. The campaign to fool the public and why it worked. Finally, the fallout from it. We'll also take a look at this little guy. It's a recycling symbol, right? So plastic recycling obviously works? Nope. I'll get into that one later.
So, let's look behind that green curtain, starting with the technical difficulty of repurposing plastic, because most just can't be recycled. This is material that came into the recycling facility from people's recycling carts and is going to leave as trash. For starters, there are thousands of different types of plastics that can't be recycled together. They have to be carefully sorted, and even a tiny bit of the wrong type can ruin an entire batch. A recycling plant melting down a mix of plastic bottles, bags, and yogurt cups would be like baking a cake with random ingredients, and in the end, they get an uncomfortable, unpleasant mess.
There are a few types of plastic that can be recycled. Soda and water bottles, and some food jars can be made into things, but most others, like grocery bags, come with their own problems. You have to climb in for a couple hours every day and cut them out with a box cutter. Even if the plastics are sorted properly, recycling degrades the quality of the material. Most plastics can only be recycled once or twice before they're completely unusable. And thanks to all those factors, recycling plastics is super expensive. So expensive, it's cheaper for people to trick us into thinking they're recycling when they're just making new stuff instead.
When all is said and done, despite us feeling good when we sort our trash, only about 5% of the 48 million tons of plastic waste in the US each year is actually recycled. The rest, recycling centers send billions of pounds to landfills or overseas rather than recycling it the way we thought. Now, I know landfills get a bad rap, but we'll get into why they're actually a great choice in just a minute. And shipping our plastics overseas is a much worse solution. There's the energy and materials used to ship them, and when they get to the usually poor nations that take in that garbage, those countries will often just burn it or dump it in the ocean. It's an ugly side of being green.
So, how did we get here? Well, to understand that, we have to go back to World War II, when plastic exploded into the US economy. The war brought about a lot of unexpected inventions, from the microwave to the Slinky, that were all byproducts of trying to win the war. World War II also marked a turning point for the plastics industry. The war effort required huge amounts of cheap, durable material for everything from military equipment to consumer goods, and plastics fit the bill perfectly. A tidal wave of plastics hit the country. There was vinyl flooring, Formica countertops, even snazzy polyester suits. Plastic was ultra-modern, and production surged year after year.
But as the industry grew, the waste did too. Single-use disposable items like cutlery and food packaging became increasingly common, and people started getting worried. Concern over plastic pollution started gaining traction in the '60s, and the environmentalist movement caught on. And people began to question the whole throwaway culture and demand sustainable alternatives. And a lot of this led to deception by the plastics industry, politicians, environmentalists, and the media aided it all up.
The plastics industry had mounted a massive PR campaign to calm the growing fears about plastic waste. This was during the '70s and '80s. They also promoted recycling as the solution to plastic waste. They formed a front group called Keep America Beautiful to convince Americans it was their responsibility to clean up the environment, not the corporations. But it wasn't just plastic manufacturers who were involved. Organizations like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society joined the group. Decades later, they dropped out, claiming they discovered that it was a front. The industry spent millions of dollars on ads about the virtues of recycling, even as executives personally doubted whether the process was financially viable at all.
One of the most pervasive and misleading tactics was the introduction of the chasing arrows symbol, which indicates a product can be recycled. Except that it doesn't indicate that at all. The original symbol was designed for the very first Earth Day. It's recognized worldwide as a symbol for recycling. It's also a public domain symbol, so that it's not trademarked. And that means if you were, say, a plastics industry guy, you could alter the symbol a little bit. You could fool the public into thinking they're buying recycled or recyclable products. That little symbol means nothing. Only the number code inside of it. If it's one or two, yes, that item can be recycled. If it's a different number, it actually means it can't be recycled. Of the seven common plastic categories, only two are widely recycled. The rest, even though they have the chasing arrows symbol on it, largely end up in landfills. By plastering the logo everywhere, the industry created a false impression of recyclability. And all the while, behind closed doors, industry officials knew the limitations of recycling. I think they knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot.
Now, it's not clear whether the politicians, the media, and environmentalists knew the extent of the downside, but they've known it for a long time since. And they know that it's not a silver bullet. Yet, they still push it. More than push it, they spend millions and millions of dollars on recycling programs and punish people who refuse to take part. But actually, sending all that plastic to landfills won't cause them to be overwhelmed here or anywhere else. We collectively freaked out as a nation in 1997 thanks to this garbage barge, the Mobro 4000. It had New Yorkers' trash and no place to put it, traveling thousands of miles and getting massive press coverage. It gave a lot of Americans the impression that our landfills were so full, we were shipping our trash out to sea. The truth is, landfills are nowhere near full, and proper landfills are wildly efficient. They don't take up that much room at all. They're well-regulated, and they can eventually be turned into parks and open spaces. An economist at Gonzaga University calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage, not just plastic, at the current rate for 1,000 years, and all of it is put in landfills 100 yards deep, by the year 3000, it would fill a piece of land 35 miles on each side and eventually be turned into a park, adding a tiny addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.
So, why did environmentalists and politicians push recycling when, at the very least, they knew there were questions about whether it worked? Why have cities been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these programs? Well, that's actually one of the answers right there. A lot of people are making a lot of money in the recycling business and environmental jobs, and they don't want those jobs to go away. But the overarching reason may be a lot simpler. We love feeling morally superior, and we love telling other people how to be better, just like we are. Some of these rules are just so arbitrary and silly. It's simply a way, I think, for greens and for some politicians to pretend that they're saving the planet.
So, this recycling doesn't work, but there's also a compelling argument that it's actively harmful. Cities and governments had poured time and money into recycling programs for years, costing taxpayers while lining the pockets of environmentalists and the plastics industry and the recycling industry. Take New York City, for example. A 2020 report showed that the city could save $340 million a year by putting all of their garbage into landfills instead of trying to recycle it. Every time a sanitation department crew picks up a load of bottles and cans from the curb, they lose more money. And maybe that's something that we'd be willing to sacrifice if it actually helped the environment. But there's no reason to believe that it does. Multiply this times thousands of cities across the globe, and the financial toll is staggering. If we're really concerned about the environment, shouldn't we want that money to go to programs that actually work? One researcher called recycling the most wasteful activity in modern America, and he wasn't that far off.
But again, you and I get something out of this happiness. We sort our plastics, believing we're doing something good. And I'm no stranger to echo righteousness. After I researched this video, I felt the opposite. I actually started throwing away plastic, and I got to say, it felt icky. But recycling plastic doesn't just fail to solve the problem, it actually contributes to it. And at this point, plastic recycling and much of all recycling is doing more harm than good.
The recycling campaigns remind me of another truth we've been told our whole lives: that teachers are vastly underpaid. I believed it my whole life. Teachers believe it. Pretty much everyone believes it. But if you're interested, an 11-minute video will know more than almost all of them.
Hey, thanks for watching. I hope I gave you something to think about, and that you come back again.