What Plastic Recycling Really Needs: Rational Critical Thinking

Wouldn't we be frustrated if NPR did a story on low health and safety standards of vegetarian restaurants in Indonesia, and made the story about vegetarianism without comparing the standards at meat-centric Indonesian restaurants? This is an example I use of critical thinking when I give a talk on recycling markets. I'm not against improving them, and shining critical light on them may be helpful. But isn't associating poor hygiene with vegetarianism and not visiting a control group of meat restaurants a rather cringeworthy example of #gotchajournalism clickbait?

Note to all editors of all news organizations.... Always compare recycling to virgin material production, please, and not to an idealized image of recycling.

There's Always Market Demand for Rational Critical Thinking.  It's just undervalued.  The problem has plagued Journalism ever since newspapers lost the one-third of revenue from classified ads... if only News Corp or New York Times had purchased / invested in eBay 25 years ago...

The drop in revenues continues as journalism competes with online advertising, targeted to unique consumer data from Alphabet, Meta and Amazon.  And "free content" abounds - woefully edited or fact-checked - via links to fake news shared by "friends of friends" online.

That's a long way to approach the reporting on the state of plastic recycling by NPR's Laura Sullivan.  She has made her biography synonymous with a story that Plastic Recycling is a big lie... Either she can fix this herself, or we need tenure-seeking professors and graduate students to lay some math and control group facts on her "conclusions".

"Sullivan won her third duPont in 2022 for her Planet Money podcast WASTE LAND, an investigation with Frontline into Big Oil and the myth of recycling plastic. The California's attorney general opened an investigation into the oil companies citing NPR's reporting, saying the companies participated in a "half century of deception" perpetuating a myth that plastic could be recycled in an effort to manipulate the public to buy more of it."

I learned a lot by trying to show CBS 60 Minutes producer Solly Granatstein that the CRT computer monitors were nowhere in evidence in the Scott Pelley footage of Guiyu. I showed his team, before the segment ran, photos of the factories that bought the CRT monitors for re-manufacturing and reuse. Later I sent them emails showing the "toxic river" in Guiyu was immediately downstream from the largest textile factories on earth, and that the water samples were pretty much identical to Bangladesh textile factory effluent in the Lourajang River. Later still, I helped Adam Minter investigate the integrated chip reuse markets which actually drove the circuit board recycling market in Guiyu... Reuse is still being attacked as "counterfeit".  

So what's the best we can hope for when a reporter with the best of intentions gets sucked into a false narrative, or is provided misleading statistics by Greenpeace and Basel Action Network?  Whether it's about reuse of TVs by Africans purchasing from UK hotel upgrades, or PETE plastic purchased by fabric manufacturers, it's very hard to maneuver when a good person like Laura or Solly gets trapped in a false math paradigm.

It's always about math.  Data journalism is harder to buy when the newsroom has lost classified ad and advertising revenue. The Math majors head off for careers on Wall Street or High Tech firms... and we are left with Laura Sullivan repeating that PETE and HDPE bottles divided by all plastics manufactured (9%) can be compared to aluminum beverage cans recycled divided by (and only by) aluminum cans manufactured (45%). That was covered in the last blog.

So what I recommend is that recyclers continue to provide math, as I did to MIT, Memorial University, University of Southern California, Arizona State, Pontifica Universidad Catholica de Peru, etc.  This uses the reporters elevation of a "shocking" story to professors who are looking for topics to interest students --- and students like to research contemporary news stories.  It took 15 years to pretty much expose the CBS 60 Minutes Wasteland story as racial profiling... and we still haven't reached everyone on that.  How can we respond more quickly to Laura Sullivan and NPR's math mistake?

One fallacy at a time.  Each fallacy, we hope, provides an A+ paper for a graduate or undergraduate student, such as (now Dr.) Grace Akese under Dr. Josh Lepawsky at Memorial University.  

So here's some fodder for students eager to research Laura Sullivan's thesis that the plastics that APR claims are recycled are not really recycled.  

First, let me tip my hat to @LauraSullivan for taking the time to carefully respond to MassRecycle President Gretchen Carey's letter asking Sullivan to clarify that the recycling rate of RECYCLABLE bottles is legitimate and shouldn't be falsely impugned by a faulty denominator. Apples to Apples, as the saying goes... don't divide aluminum cans by aluminum cans and divide PETE by  PVC pipe and car seats plastic.  As one of the Board of Directors of MassRecycle I had a chance to advise Gretchen Carey on her November 10 letter in defense of plastics that ARE truly recycled. 

"The opening statement “The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills“ strongly implies that recycling facilities are sending recyclable plastics into landfills.  It is vital to clarify that the recyclable plastics in the bin are being recycled. In Massachusetts, approximately 75-85% of the material in the bin is recycled and given a second life as new products. Recycling is real. MassRecycle offers facility tours to the public, including tours of Material Recovery Facilities where recycling is processed, so you can see this for yourself. 

"Furthermore, this story states that “…no plastic — not even soda bottles…meets the threshold to be called ‘recyclable’ … Plastic must have a recycling rate of 30% to reach that standard”, yet it excludes the Greenpeace finding that 100% of Material Recovery Facilities in the US accept plastic bottles (Table 1. on page 9 of the report). This reinforces the public misconception that recycling facilities are not processing collected materials. Recyclable plastics are not reaching a 30% recycling rate because consumers are not putting them into the bin or consumers do not have access to municipal collection.  We would ask that you add this information to your article and present the reasons that plastic bottles are not reaching the threshold to be called “recyclable”.    

MassRecycle correctly makes the case that low recycling rates for PETE and HDPE are mainly the result of poor public participation, and @NPR Laura Sullivan's presentation will further undermine that participation.

So what's Sullivan's response?  Again to her credit, she refers MassRecycle to a NAPCOR 2017 report on plastic recycling.  Here's a chart on page 4 of that report.

For single use containers (left blue total), the percent sent to "disposal" is indeed greater than the percent made into fiber, sheet and film, strapping, food and beverage bottles, and non-food and other. But it is NOT 91% disposed.  So good on Sullivan for linking this study in her response to MassRecycle's Carey.

But then Sullivan makes some cringeworthy statements impugning the RECYCLING industry, arguing that it's not a success.  For example, Sullivan notes below:

1. MRF: The Recycling Partnership says that 15% of bottles are lost in a MRF. That brings the 100 PET bottles down to 85. Those 85 bottles are trucked to the plastic reprocessor.
2. Plastic Reprocessor: According to both Coca-Cola/ALPLA and NAPCOR, about 33% of incoming bale material is wasted in processing. So that brings the total amount of recycled plastic made to 57% (=67%x85).

 "Suddenly the 85 percent figure is down to 57 percent."

 

and then she goes on to say "But I remain skeptical. Even if every American put every bottle into a bin, the outcome would not lead to a world where “plastic stays out of landfills.” At best, the material is recycled once or twice, at worst, the majority of it is never turned into anything at all and winds up in a poor country’s waterways. There is steel in cans in this country that has been recycled for four decades. This will never be true for plastic because of its chemical makeup."

When I was heading the recycling program for Massachusetts DEP in the 1990s, I remember a reporter asking about office paper recycling... they'd been told by an environmentalist that most office paper is recycled into toilet and tissue paper, and that to "truly recycle" the office paper needed to be made back into office paper. This was the first reference I remember to so-called "downcycling".

Or people would cite how much recycled paper was lost in "processing", without looking at how much of a tree is "lost" in the process of virgin paper manufacturing. Recycling - imperfect as it is - beats mining, refining, and extraction of virgin materials, every time.

As I responded then, if we stop or discount office paper recycling, we will either have to send more trucks into forests to cut down more trees, ... or "hope" that everyone stops using toilet paper?

Sullivan's reasoning that bottle plastics manufactured into shoes and carpets will "eventually" wind up in landfills makes the same fallacy. If people stop participating in plastic recycling she discounts, will we all go barefoot? Or will shoes be made out of virgin material? And if we do go barefoot, we'll need more carpeting... you get my point.

Sullivan was obviously negatively impressed in her visit to Indonesia plastic recycling... as was Adam Minter during his visits with Dr. Joshua Goldstein (USC China History professor) to the Chinese plastic processing yards in Ningbo a dozen years ago. But Adam and I discussed the "toilet paper from office paper or toilet paper from trees" Marketplace, and he agreed that to compare the plastic recycling in Asia, or the metal recycling in Africa, or the paper recycling in India, etc, that you have to compare it to VIRGIN MATERIAL PRODUCTION.

This White Paper by the Association of Plastics Recyclers (APR) does just that. A student doing research on plastic recycling should compare Laura Sullivan's findings NOT to what the true percentage of landfill diversion is, but to how much more raw petrochemical processing would occur if-not-but-for the recycling efforts.

"The perfect is the enemy of the good"?

Yes, plastic recycling rates are lower than steel (though if glass sent for "daily cover" at landfills is excluded, glass is probably even worse than PETE or HDPE). But both plastics and steel both also go into the construction of buildings. Chinese skyscrapers have plastic piping and steel rebar. If that durable use (like carpets) is a "scandal" in recycling rates, and fewer consumers believe their efforts to recycle matter as a result of the NPR story, the reporter doesn't deserve a Polk or Pelley Award.

As I concluded in my brief LinkedIn post this week (which is competing a lot with time spent here on the blog),

"You cannot analyze #recycling policy without considering #virgin raw material extraction. The worst plastic recycling in Asia is better than the best petroleum polymer refining in Asia. Ending recycling and expecting the environment to benefit is #magicalthinking, not a path to #sustainability. We always want our recycling industry to constantly improve in safety and efficiency, but pretending that stuff made out of forests, mountains, and ocean drilling is better than recycled content is #owngoal for environmentalists."

Adam Minter credits me with a final takeaway he leaves with at his public speaking events."The best mining is worse, environmentally, than the worst recycling".

Hopefully Laura Sullivan is serious in her response to MassRecycle's Gretchen Carey that she is "going to continue to report on this and will take you up on the offer to come visit. I will definitely want to see the factories where those bottles are being turned into jackets, carpets or whatever else – not a broker receipt. I’ve had to turn my attention to another topic at the moment, but I will continue to circle back."

What Laura Sullivan and Gretchen Carey both need to do is to visit Houston Polymer, an example of virgin plastic refining in the well-regulated USA.  Then go to the beach. Better yet, then go back to Indonesia to visit the virgin extraction and refining industries there... the ones that mine tin from coral islands so Americans can feel good about "leadfree" solder (which was never difficult to recycle).

Laura Sullivan's response to our MassRecycle Board of Directors letter ends on a positive, constructive note. "Thanks again for taking the time to write. Rigorous discussion always makes reporting better on every front, and I truly appreciate your thoughts. Best, Laura"

Let's start with the assumption that, like shoes and toilet paper, Indonesia is going to meet its industrial and consumer demand for plastic, either from virgin refining or recycling sources. The way that demand is met - the environmental lifecycle analysis - doesn't mean recycling systems are perfect. But if Sullivan is measuring processing loss at MRFs - mostly from removing food contaminated or misdirected PVC containers - she should also measure the loss and effluent and carbon and poison emitted by NON-recycled feedstock. Making tissue from office paper isn't perfect, but it's a wasted analysis if the inefficiencies are not compared to those of making tissue paper out of trees.

To repeat the question - Wouldn't we be frustrated if NPR did a story on low health and safety standards of vegetarian restaurants in Indonesia, and made the story about vegetarianism without comparing the standards at meat-centric Indonesian restaurants? You could discourage a lot of vegetarians and make meat eaters feel better about not being vegetarian. But you are not doing Mother Earth any favors. We shouldn't compare plastic recycling to steel recycling - we should compare it to making the exact same plastic end products out of virgin natural resources.

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As my journalism professor dad always warned, when the news keepers cannot make a profit, they pay reporters less, and the outcome is that journalists look for other sources of value... EGO. PRIDE. THE BYLINE. He warned of a tipping point which could bring us back to yellow journalism (look it up).