Plastic recycling is not a lie. It's not perfect, but if you have to choose how your fresh spinach leaves are sold to people who live in Vermont, steel cans, copper, glass and paper may be easier to recycle at the end of package life... but lifecycle analysis of mining and refining and transportation also count for the environment. We need to keep working to fix the parts of plastic recycling that are not working, but attacking the plastic recyclers who ARE WORKING is shameful. Lying about PETE bottle bill plastic recycling will not fix the recycling prospects for a microgram of toothbrush at its end of life.
In part 1 of "Recycling is not a Lie" we shared just how aggravating it is to have African Geeks in the Tech Sector profiled as landfill scavengers. Yes they are both black, and yes they both make less money that the white guy running mobile phones through a shredder while wearing a white lab coat. In the same kind of way, successful plastic recycling companies are being cast as failures because the word "plastic recycling" doesn't cover the toothbrush. In both cases, the arrogant claim that "Recycling Is A Lie" profiles honest, incredible people as shameful.
PETE (#1) and HDPE (#2) Plastics are incredibly successful. They are not subsidized, they are not "a lie", and they are not thrown away at the recycling facilities. People who are telling us that may have a legitimate gripe about the film plastic your spinach leaves were transported in, but they don't have an answer other than "don't eat your spinach". They might imagine that spinach farmers in Mexico will successfully ship it 3000 miles without most of it spoiling, or being packaged in material far heavier to transport and more harmful in lifecycle analysis (see Oregon DEP study on paper bags vs. single use plastic). But doing so, they imagine they are more truthful than Malaysian Plastic Recycling Factories.
I'll focus on Malaysia, because Malaysia and Indonesia are getting a lot of recycling hate, and I've got experience with successful plastic recyclers - inventors and investors - in both nations. Both nations have been "Asian Tigers", economies who have muslim-majority DEMOCRACIES. There is plenty to criticize (extinction of orangutans for palm oil plantations for starters), but attacking their plastic recyclers is just ignorant.
I have learned the hard way that it is dangerous to single out a single recycler unless they are already (a la Joe "Hurricane" Benson in the UK, or Semarang Indonesia's PT Imtech) falsely accused. Saying "what is wrong with this factory" has drawn sick attacks, like Jim Puckett's letter shutting down my friends at Net Peripheral in Penang Malaysia after Adam Minter visited them and wrote about them in Recycling International. But let's just look at the largest Malaysia recycler on this list.
Oliver Franklin-Wallis, reporter at The Guardian and author of Wasteland, at least accepted my invitations to meet and speak about the potential for "collateral damage" in Emerging Markets. He visited Evans Quaye's shop in Accra (the smallest electronics refurbished I could risk introducing him to), and as a result wrote a nuanced chapter about his capacity to judge Africa's Tech Sector. And to his credit, he admitted to me he had not visited a single plastic recycler in Malaysia or Indonesia while writing about their businesses (blamed covid travel restrictions). Oli is honest. But Alexander Clapp has not responded to any of my twitter or Linkedin invitations. Alexander Clapp is the one who told the NYTimes that people like me are LYING about recycling.
Here is a plastic recycling plant my Fair Trade Recycling Team visited in Semarang Indonesia about 15 years ago, when the factory was being "outed" by Basel Action Network as a "primitive" operation. We verified their ISO Certifications and photographed their ABS and HiPS plastic recycling lines. Colin Davis, my former VP and Middlebury College Grad (now CEO at Shacksbury Cider) visited in 2009 (I think).
This factory used plastic from used computer monitor housings - removing their paper and foil labels - to peletize them, adding black die, and made brand new computer monitor plastic housings out of 100% recycled plastic. Was the factory perfect? No, but it made brand new computer monitors as a contract manufacturer to OEMs before converting to a recycling and reuse operation... so making computer monitors out of old computer monitors seems like progress to me. The plastic was just one part of the operation - they reused 4 year old CRTs to make affordable new TVs and monitors as well... while USA companies were grinding those CRTs up to make abandoned piles of toxic dust, and accusing this factory (through BAN.org) of lying. That was more than 15 years ago... my guess is that Alexander Clapp was in Junior High School at the time. Now he's "recycling" Puckett's stories about these genius entrepreneurs... sigh. Maybe someone in his friends and family circle will read this and suggest he is only "holding up a mirror" to factless journalism.
So back to the present day. I've posted the image and link to the list of the largest plastic recyclers operating in Malaysia as of 2023. Clapp and Puckett have accused the largest factory (in that they have accused ALL of them) of operating illegally.
The factory claims to recycle 60,000 tons per year of HDPE (milk jug), LDPE (film), and PP Plastic grades into pellets that can be extruded to make new products. Putting a photo of domestically generated Indonesia river mixed-plastic litter hardly disqualifies their claims to employe hundreds of staff, or their ISO 14001 certification, or their import permits. If Alexander Clapp wants to accuse this factory of lying, he has had more than 10 years to visit and show us how they manage to pay for the plastic (PETE and HDPE scrap sell for much more per ton than paper), pay for shipping, employ hundreds, document residuals management, and somehow are "lying" and somehow responsible for plastic litter in an Indonesian river thousands of kilometers away.
Burden of proof much?
