PRESS RELEASE: Recycling Sisterhood Bene Gesserit of Sustainability Thwarting Harkonen Waste Management

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 1, 2025

Waste Arrakis: Elite Recycling Sisterhood Revealed as Bene Gesserit to Thwart Harkonen Waste Empire

BOSTON, MA – In a stunning development uncovered today (April 1st, obviously), a covert order of elite recycling professionals has been outed as none other than the secretive Bene Gesserit of sustainability—a powerful collective silently shaping the environmental future of the galaxy... one compost bin at a time.

The Prophecy: Children and great-grandchildren yet to be born will care whether we kept the water pure and made finite world resources last, and they will appreciate the sustainability we try to care about today.

Operating for decades under the guise of state officials, nonprofit leaders, and municipal department heads, this fearless group has been secretly resisting the expansion of the galactic menace known as Harkonen Hauling Waste Management, along with its sinister subsidiaries: Harkonen Mining (motto: "Strip it faster!") and Harkonen New Produce Obsolescence Corporation (creators of the 6-day toaster).

When the Harkonen Waste Wars latest battle brought on gaslighting of recycling participants, markets, businesses, and workers - with bold "RECYCLING IS A LIE" Blimps floating over Earth Day Festivities, it awakened a quiet set of sorceresses who have been supporting the environment for decades, as described in the Great Book of Recycling.

Meet the Sisterhood of the Circular Economy:

• Brooke Nash (MA DEP) – High Reverend Mother of End Markets and Master of the “Waste Not” Litany.
• Megan Schulz-Fontes (NERC) – Keeper of the Northeast Waste Path and Mistress of Materials Flow.
• Laura Olivier (Earthworm Recycling) – Whisperer of Compost, Summoner of Worm Armies.
• Reagan Bissonette (NRRA) – Wielder of the Spice of Source Separation; Prophetess of Post-Consumer Peace.
• Gretchen Carey (MassRecycle) – Queen of Education Outreach, feared for her deadly accurate eco-haikus.
• Terri L. Goldberg – Supreme Auditor of Hazardous Substances and Knower of All That is Buried.
• Kathi Mirza (MA DEP) – Code-breaker of Collection Data; her spreadsheets strike terror into the hearts of cartels.
• Waneta Trabert (Newton MA DPW) – Commander of Municipal Resistance, known as “The Waste Whisperer of Walnut Street.”
• Abbey Massaro (MassRecycle) - Vision Mother of the Context.

The Prophecy: Future generations around the world will benefit from one person's impact - each of our impacts. What we are doing today will matter.

The Conflict:

As Harkonen forces spread cheap plastic packaging, fake recycling apps, and new operating systems that turn working laser printers into boat anchors, the Bene Gesserit Recycling Order has activated their plan: The Great Diversion. It includes zero-waste Jedi training, organics mind-melding, and an AI-powered Extended Producer Responsibility sandworm.

“We must conserve for the next generation, the prophesized children of the future,” said Nash during a recent council. “We will not permit the waste stream to flow unchecked.”

Sources say the Sisterhood has infiltrated multiple board meetings under the cover of “public comment periods” and is rumored to have hypnotized several corporate executives with repeated chants of “Reduce, Reuse, Refuse.”

The Prophecy: Mothers will see the importance of the world their children's children will inherit.

"Extract! Carbonize! Brickware! Dispose!" - Harkonen Waste Motto

What’s Next?

A climactic battle is rumored for Earth Day, in which the Sisterhood will ride in on solar-powered e-bikes to challenge the Harkonen clan at their last known landfill stronghold, armed with reusable tote bags, carrot peels, and a binder of intergalactic waste bans.

When asked for comment, Harkonen CEO Vladimir Dumpstrakh simply muttered, “Curse those witches of waste... they sorted everything.”

The Prophecy: A kinder, gentler, more sustainable Sandworm can be nurtured and bred, to make our Spice more sustainable...

Anne McGovern, Christine Beling, and Susan Cascino, Laura Dubester, Lynn Rubenstein - and many others whose claims that the Sisterhood existed were scorned as Recycling Lies - are passing out the Prophesy Popcorn.

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".