Halloween Statistics: Greenpeace Quit Saving the Whales, Now We Must Save the DataJournalists

Happy Halloween!  This year, I'm going as a very scary statistic.

What do we do when someone with a reputation for caring about the poor, caring about endangered species, etc., uses their reputation to convince the Mainstream Press of a false math account? When they create mainstream story that exaggerates the actual problems - many of which are real - they create what #KirstenLinnenkoper labels "The Plastic Boogeyman" in this month's Recycling International.

Somewhere, deep in our amygdala, English Majors are afraid of math. English majors are more likely to become journalists - or "photojournalists" - than they are to be #datajournalists.  And we are seeing this routine over and over again, as a #CharityIndustrialComplex makes up numbers to scare reporters, who seem at a loss over how to fact-check.

Michal Manas, Baled PETE in Czech Republic, Wikimedia Commons

This year, the #fakestat is "Nine Percent".  Greenpeace snuck their own executive summary onto an otherwise sound piece of plastic recycling research.  And they get mainstream press to report that of all single serve plastic containers sold, only 9% of plastic containers are recycled. The conclusion they allow some reporters to leave with is that only 9% of the plastic in this photo above really gets recycled. At least, I heard reporters say that, and so far, Greenpeace and BAN have yet to correct it.

Nine percent sounds really bad. If you are a city, why even bother to pay for collecting those containers? If you are a resident, why bother putting PETE or HDPE into the blue bin? On NPR's "It's Been A Minute" a few months ago, the panel glibly announced SPECIFICALLY that of what you put into a recycling blue bin, only 9% really gets recycled.

Compare that to Aluminum containers. Putting aside that these stats themselves suffer from "Formal Sector" bias (many aluminum cans get recycled in China and Africa and India, where there is no formal "spreadsheet" to track it), the 9% Greenpeace statistic is awful compared to Aluminum Cans.

"Notably, while the Aluminum Association has reported a 45.2% consumer recycling rate for aluminum cans, the RRS analysis uses 38% as the national baseline to reflect the percentage of aluminum that actually makes it to remelting facilities, after material losses that occur during collection and sorting." 2022 Press Release, Ball Systems and RRS

So they divide recycled aluminum cans by all aluminum cans.

collected in the numerator

divided by cans manufactured in the denominator

The numerator of the Aluminum Statistic are tons of aluminum single serve containers documented to be recycled. (formal sector numbers).  Now, look at the Plastic report calculation, covered in Science.org in 2017... TITLE? 

Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made

"As of 2015, approximately 6300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated, around 9% of which had been recycled, 12% was incinerated, and 79% was accumulated in landfills or the natural environment."  https://lnkd.in/e_wN-t5j

See that? The numerator is plastic recycling - mostly single serve PETE and HDPE containers, though LDPE Film is also legitimately recovered.  All are reclaimed at higher than 9% rates - if we measure it the way aluminum cans are measured.  But if you follow the link to the study, the DENOMINATOR is all plastic ever produced.  Greenpeace divides the captured recycling containers and divides them by bottles PLUS child car seats, underground PVC pipe, auto bumpers, etc.

Recycled bottles in the numerator, divided by ALL PLASTIC EVER PRODUCED

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In 2005, a year before I started this Blog, retired Greenpeace Founder Patrick Moore published this in the Miami Herald - the same time BAN and Greenpeace started press releases about "ewaste exports"
http://greenspiritstrategies.com/the-environmental-movement-greens-have-lost-their-way/

Special to the Miami Herald

January 28, 2005

Scare tactics, disinformation go too far

I  am often asked why I broke ranks with Greenpeace after 15 years as a founder and full-time environmental activist. I had my personal reasons, but it was on issues of policy that I found it necessary to move on.

By the mid-1980s, the environmental movement had abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. I became aware of the emerging concept of sustainable development: balancing environmental, social and economic priorities. Converted to the idea that win-win solutions could be found by bringing all interests together, I made the move from confrontation to consensus.

Since then, I have worked under the banner of Greenspirit to develop an environmental policy platform based on science, logic and the recognition that more than six billion people need to survive and prosper every day of the year. The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support.

We’re faced with environmental policies that ignore science and result in increased risk to human health and ecology. To borrow from the vernacular, how sick is that?

The misuse of data and poor fact checking by mainstream press has long been a theme of this blog. Misleading statistics in this case will lead to people throwing PETE, HDPE, and LDPE film away, if they think they aren't "really" getting recycled. Greenpeace meanwhile did no original research, just pulled a 2017 study, and generated a "scary" statistic.

Remember the "Scary Halloween Images of Black People" blog? It is 2012, the tenth anniversary.  According to Greenpeace and BAN, that's over 100 years ago...

Basel Action Network infamously pushed that its #fakestat that "80-90%" of electronics recycling was a "dirty little secret" - that they were dumped in places like Agbogbloshie - the Accra city scrapyard. Greenpeace described Agbogbloshie as a remote fishing village (it's an auto scrapyard in the center of the City, a metropolis of ~5M urban Africans, and has been for over 50 years). The REAL "Dirty Little Secret" was that there WASN'T a "Dirty Little Secret".  

What does the retired, original Founder President of Greenpeace have to say about the #fakestat tactics? In an essay published in 2018, Patrick Moore wrote:

"Greenpeace is a very successful business. Their business model can be summarized as follows:

1. Invent an “environmental problem” which sounds somewhat plausible. Provide anecdotal evidence to support your claims, with emotionally powerful imagery.
2. Invent a “simple solution” for the problem which sounds somewhat plausible and emotionally appealing, but is physically unlikely to ever be implemented.
3. Pick an “enemy” and blame them for obstructing the implementation of the “solution”. Imply that anybody who disagrees with you is probably working for this enemy.
4. Dismiss any alternative “solutions” to your problem as “completely inadequate”.

At each of the four stages, they campaign to raise awareness of the efforts that they are allegedly making to “fight” this problem. Concerned citizens then either sign up as “members” (with annual fees) or make individual donations (e.g., $25 or more) to help them in “the fight”. This model has been very successful for them, with an annual turnover of about $400 million ($0.4 billion). Although technically a “not for profit” organization, this has not stopped them from increasing their asset value over the years, and they currently have an asset value of $270 million ($0.27 billion) – with 65% of that in cash, making them a cash-rich business. Several other groups have also adopted this approach, e.g., Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, WWF and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

So if this is known and baked in, how do BAN and Greenpeace nonetheless get such a wildly inaccurate claim to be covered by BBC, Economist, Le Monde, CNN, Al Jazeera, etc? 

We need to pay reporters enough to attract Math Majors.

Here, by the way, is how @AdamMinter @Bloomberg explained the single use PETE and HDPE containers last July, in an apples to apples fashion:

"In 2020, recyclers collected 27.1% of the bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate and 28.8% of the high density polyethylene bottles used in the US. " "Those rates were down compared with 2019 due to Covid-related disruptions to curbside recycling "

- Adam Minter,  Bloomberg, July 11, 2022 "Plastics Recycling is Working, So Ignore the Cynics"

 

When interviewing a source with a reputation for environmentalism, press reporters can be completely caught off guard if you give a sciency-sounding statistic. 80% of what Africans buy for import is primitively recycled days later. Where did the number come from? If you are the Ayatollah of E-Waste, questioning the provenance of the statistic is worthy of environmental fatwah.

Reminder of another blog published nearly 10 years ago... of Basel Action Network trying to deny it was the source of the 80% #FakeStat it was circulating.

Despite World Bank statistics saying the majority of households in Accra owned at least one TV 25 years ago, anything at the dump is presumed to be externalized by wealthy countries... Surely, the truth must be somewhere in between... so whether or not it's 80% or 90%, it surely must be over half is junk? Now the two organizations are doing the same trick with plastic recycling. They are not covering where the plastics is NOT being recycled. They are accusing the collectors, the recyclers themselves, of not really recycling. And they are backing this accusations with #fakestats. Like the one the UK Barrister cited in the conviction of Joe "Hurricane" Benson. If it was "common knowledge" that 80% of the TVs people purchased from Benson were not reused or repaired or recycled, but dumped in a landfill, it was easy for the judge, like the reporters, to shift the burden of proof to Benson. Greenpeace and BAN are now doing the same thing to plastic recyclers. I used to donated to Greenpeace. I tried helping BAN for years to improve the situation, to meet importers in the reuse market (legal under Basel Convention Annex IX B1110) halfway. BAN called the Annex IX a "loophole", and as the last blog described, they may succeed in making the next Joe Benson a criminal because they're trying to amend the Convention to criminalize reuse. This next example is Greenpeace and BAN's claim that only 5% of plastics is recycled. And when NPR, NYT, and CNN mistakenly take that to mean only 5-9% of containers put into a blue box are actually recycled, the organizations are just as silent as they were over the "collateral damage" of Hurricane Joe Benson's disgusting, racist, sentencing (before Annex IX was even actively discussed to be amended in 2023).