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".