A friend from Carleton College, physican, philosopher, professor and author Peter Ubel, nominated me on Facebook to comment on a new Frontline and NPR series:
The headline implies that plastic never would be recycled. I've seen some other reporting to this effect, harkening back to the Penn and Teller video "Recycling is Bull***t".
How about:
"Some in Big Oil Misled the Public Into Believing More Plastic Would Be Recycled Than Could Be"
The thing is, plastics recycling is not all that complicated to explain, compared to say health care policy.
"Part of the problem with mixed plastics recycling is insufficient participation. Manufacturers cannot meet % recycled content goals if consumers don't participate. "Another is over-participation. When in doubt, leave it out. Over-eager recyclers contaminate feedstock with mayo. "
Not really that political.
Some bullet points:
- Some plastics recycle very well, like PETE and HDPE. Plastic that contained liquid is easier to rinse and has fewer contaminants. HDPE suffers a bit from glued paper labels, but still has a market if it's clean stuff like liquid soap.
- The link to the invention of disposable plastic bottles, the creation of anti-litter bottle bills, and PETE recycling is a wee complex, but fascinating. The older lobbyist is right, that when the PET was introduced, he was told to say it was recyclable though they hadn't a clue how. But once a critical mass of the bottles was collected - through deposit laws opposed by the industry - there was a "BUYERS MARKET" and investors paid for rinsing and recycling equipment. Plastic recycling may never have been invented without the anti-litter bottle bills.
- Other plastics are commonly too contaminated (e.g. peanut butter and mayo jars)
- Still other plastics are too small in scale (e.g. wrap, straws and bags) to be economical to separate out for recycling.
- Many types of plastic are, at their origin, a form of recycling. Petroleum and natural gas need to be refined, and refining the raw slime into things like gasoline and propane creates byproducts, which can be reconfigured from monomers into polymers. If you ban the use of those plastics, but still allow the sale of gasoline, you took a step backward in sustainability.
- A number of studies (like one in Oregon) take a lifecycle approach, and consider things like how much spoilage would occur without the plastic, how much heavier would steel / glass / paper cartons be, how much carbon (weight of transporting steel and glass - and cutting forests to make paper) would be created in an alternative packaging universe?
- Plastic in the ocean is the result of rapidly emerging markets in the developing world, not USA recycling programs. I've written about that several times this year, and started a Fair Trade Recycling GoFundMe campaign to prime the pump for "offsets" - continue to sell stuff those markets repair and reuse, and offer a discount if they divert waste from the city gutters before monsoon season.
- It is certainly true that "mongrel plastic" manufacturers making containers for messy butters put a lot of effort into getting onto the "See! Plastic IS Recyclable" bandwagon by #1 PETE and #2 HDPE. That was a big mistake, because it leads to OVER PARTICIPATION by consumers. The dirty mongrel plastic just contaminated the clean stuff, and caused it to be shipped to lower wage countries.
- The lower wage countries that bought and sorted the mixed plastics 25 years ago are not NEARLY as low wage as they were then, and it's getting harder to sell it.
- Low prices for scrap is not a "BAD" Market. Reporters always find the negative side of the story, and its true that municipal recycling programs are more expensive. But there are BUYERS markets and SELLERS markets, and if you continue to collect rather than abandon recycling, the buyers are profitable and buy more.
There's more to say, but let's focus on the last. NPR and Frontline have a propensity to say "BAD" market, rather than "BUYER'S" market. And in fact I remember when scrap paper prices were very very high a few years ago, reporters saw paper mills close and called the SELLER'S market a "BAD" market...
Dad used to say, if a reporter wanted to see their byline (author name) "above the fold" (more prominently viewed, that the say went "if it bleeds, it leads". Reporting that there isn't necessarily a problem, or other nuance, isn't "bleedy". This creates both conscious and unconscious pressure on reporters to build up a NARRATIVE which is simple, outrageous, and powerful.
Look at the awards given to CBS 60 Minutes "Wasteland", which said it "followed the trail" of desktop CRT monitors to Guiyu - where I've proven they do not go. Saying that a big pile in one place goes to another place 100 miles away, and not being able to show ONE SINGLE MONITOR at the other place, to me isn't award-worthy journalism. I've given up on the producer, Solly Granatstein, who interviewed me and knows the truth.
And I'll wind up here on Frontline's track record. I'll just copy and paste my Facebook response, because I'm derelict in running my recycling business (and never have time for an editor review, sigh).
@Peter UbelI've written a couple of books on the subject, if I can ever sort out 15 years of blogs. To put it very simply, reporters like to put it far too simply. Once a simplistic narrative gets started (this is not original reporting at NPR), it can take years to deconstruct that narrative.
What is frustrating is that plastic recycling actually is pretty simple compared to a lot of other controversies (like health care). I can't provide bullet points here but will type some up to moderately de-simplify without overly complicating it. ^
But I will say this - as much as I have respected Frontline in the past, they were criminally negligent - and unselfconsciously racist - in their depiction of the e-waste export "crisis" 10 years ago, presenting a narrative SO simple, SO prone to outrage, that a lot of innocent African lives were ruined.
My Journalism Ph.D dad always warned me that the most caring, selfless reporters sometimes created the most collateral damage, because they want every story they report on to be heroicly convincing.
It took us 10 years to undo Frontline's opening allegation - that the City dump of Accra, identified as such during Independence, was a clean unpolluted fishing village on the outskirts of the city in 1999.
Google Maps showed it in the heart of the City of Accra, and it's been mentioned in hundreds of World Bank and IMF consulting documents commissioned during the 5 hydroelectric dam projects financed in Ghana between 1959 and 2005.
Frontline's watchers accepted the premise that a fishing village on the outskirts of the city 10 years previously was one in the same as the scrapyard they filmed in, which they had to fight traffic jams to get to. I rewatched it not long ago, and the naive journalists evidently expected to see the city of Accra scrapyard full of banana peels and coconut shells.
So -- beware collateral damage. In this case of plastic recycling, there are several types of plastic, and a headline like this has major consequences for PARTICIPATION rates by consumers. Cuts two ways - if consumers see the headline and stop recycling bottle plastics (90% of consumer plastic by weight) which are easily rinsed - collateral damage. If Plastics Lobby insists that all the other mongrel plastics - bags, majo jars, peanut butter jars, are ALSO AS RECYCLABLE as clean PETE and HDPE (90%), then Consumers OVER-Participate, contaminating the clean 90%.
NUANCE. Don't try to claim your type of plastic is recyclable if it isn't. Don't stop participating in collections if it is.
See July's post
https://retroworks.blogspot.com/2020/07/so-first-headline-germany-takes.html
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