"Yes, it can be done," Liesemer says, "but who's going to pay for it? News and Updates. Amoco's project to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Its also very water intensive, so were not going to build more plastic recycling facilities in the US.. She adds that the plastic producers have been deceptive in slapping the triangular chasing arrows shape on the bottom of products and misleading people into thinking they are recyclable, when in fact the symbol does not guarantee that. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn't hesitate. An official website of the United States government. Oh well, I guess they both go in,' " he says. "We don't have manpower to compete with this," Smith says. A new report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report found that 460 million metric tons of plastics were used in 2019, the number that nearly doubled since 2000. And they are. According to The Balance Small Business, around 69 percent of the crude steel used in the U.S. in 2019 was made from recycled material. NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. Environment Assembly begins on February 28 in Nairobi, Kenya, where formal talks are expected to begin on a future international plastics treaty, the scope of which will be discussed. At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. "I don't know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were so in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the environmental concerns that were mounting up.". It added that new technologies related to decreasing the environmental footprint of plastic represented only 1.2% of all innovation concerning the product. "The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate," he wrote. In 2018, plastics generation was 35.7million tons in the United States, which was 12.2 percent of MSW generation. | Around 85% of plastics end up in landfills, and the remaining 10% are incinerated, according to Dells research. Please click here to see any active alerts. Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. In 2018, landfills received 27million tons of plastic. "The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. The data below are from 1960 to 2018, relating to the total number of tons of plastics generated, recycled, composted, combusted with energy recovery and landfilled. She says Nestle has replaced plastic with paper on candy in the UK something theyre calling paperification. The paltry 5-6 percent U.S. plastic recycling rate in 2021 should be a wake-up call to the false promise that plastic recycling is a credible solution to plastic waste and pollution,thereport states. In 1980, the U.S. produced 7.4 million tons of plastic waste, and 38 years later, that number grew to 35.7 million tons, per the report. Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon. Green Matters is a registered trademark. "You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material," Thomas says. Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. But the public has known little about these difficulties. The COVID-19 pandemic saw the use of plastics drop by 2.2% in 2020 compared with the previous year. The sad reality is that not every piece of recycling that gets thrown into the bin gets recycled. "It didn't get recycled because the system wasn't up to par," he says. "We're very optimistic about future growth.". Official websites use .gov Listen to the episode here. New plastic bottles come off the line at a plastic manufacturing facility in Maryland. "We just don't. Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon. About 85 percent went to landfills, and tenpercent was incinerated. Therate of plastic recyclingdecreased since 2018, when it was at 8.7 percent, per the study. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic. In fact, the percentage of recycling that actually gets recycled is both surprising and, quite frankly, disconcerting. Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s. Manage My Data "Companies are using it as a 'green' marketing tool.". While overall the amount of recycled plastics is relatively smallthree million tons for a 8.7 percent recycling rate in 2018the recycling of some specific types of plastic containers is more significant. Plastics contributed 3.4% of the global greenhouse emissions in 2019, 90% of it from "production and conversion from fossil fuels," the report said. Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. | Jonathan B Jarvis and Christy Leavitt, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. That's going to exist. Facts and Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling, Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Facts and Figures Report page. "But my personal views didn't always jibe with the views I had to take as part of my job.". This web page is a brief summary of plastic materials-specific data. "Fixing recycling is an imperative, and we've got to get it right," he says. Privacy Statement "That's what they were focused on. "Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. We're there.". "After taking into account losses during recycling, only 9% of plastic waste was ultimately recycled, while 19% was incinerated and almost 50% went to sanitary landfills," it said in its Global Plastics Outlook. Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic even if there was no way to economically recycle it. Most of the recyclable plastic ends up in landfills, according to a new report. According to the Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics, the organization behind the report released on Wednesday, the recycling rate for post-consumer plastic was just 5% to 6% in 2021. At its peak in 2014, plastic recycling rates only reached 9.5 percent. Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale. Laura Sullivan/NPR Her work has appeared in theSag Harbor Expressand has aired onWSHU Public Radio. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. Proven solutions that will reduce US plastic waste and pollution already exist and can be swiftly enacted. "The basic question on the table was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren't doing enough we need to do more," Freeman says. All of it is buried. All plastic must first go through a recycling facility like this one, but only a fraction of the plastic produced actually winds up getting recycled. Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that. Unfortunately, todays recycling processes dont run exactly as smoothly as they should. Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't there to really have recycling amount to a whole lot.". When it works, recycling allows companies and individuals to repurpose their spent rubbish rather than see it piling up in a landfill. "It's pure manipulation of the consumer," he says. The success of single-use plastic bans, water refilling stations, and reusable food and dish ware can be extended nationwide., Why are American national parks filled with plastic? FILE - Storks gather over discarded plastic at the Tovlan landfill in the Jordan Valley, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Feb. 18, 2022. NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. The U.S. doesnt have the capability to recycle all of its own plastic, Jan Dell, founder of the Last Beach Cleanup, tells the Guardians Katharine Gammon. Consumers are understandably confused, Enck tells the organization. For scale, that amount of plastic weighs approximately 35,000 times more than the whole Empire State Building. But such rules need to go further, the report says. This web page contains material-specific information and data on plastics. National Geographic reports that by 2050, approximately 12 billion metric tons of plastic will be sitting in landfills across the globe. Why Did Europeans Evolve Into Becoming Lactose Tolerant? Terms of Use But then, one day, almost overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins. He tells a story about vacationing with his wife and being devastated by the plastic trash they saw. ", And there are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a top official at the industry's most powerful trade group. Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon, where paper and metals still have markets but most plastic is thrown away. Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon. There was too much plastic trash. Cat Schuknecht contributed to this report. Liesemer's job was to at least try to make recycling work because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. All Rights Reserved. "Dj vu all over again," he says as the ad finishes. They have to be sorted out. This category includes bags, sacks and wraps; other packaging; polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and jars; high-density polyethylene (HDPE) natural bottles; and other containers. The primary data source on the generation of plastics is the American Chemistry Council. Plastic resins are also used in a variety of container and packaging products, such as PET beverage bottles, HDPE bottles for milk and water, and a wide variety of other resin types used in other plastic containers, bags, sacks, wraps and lids. Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic production is expected to triple by 2050. Margaret Osborne is a freelance journalist based in the southwestern U.S. They leveraged the heartstrings of consumers and said this stuff was recyclable., Bans on single-use plastic items such as bags, food containers and utensils are increasingly popular, with versions adopted in places including the European Union, the state of California, and Los Angeles. JavaScript appears to be disabled on this computer. Only five percent of the material was in the correct condition to be recycled. As a result, the actual recycling percentages of each also tend to be quite different. With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of time thinking about the oceans and what will happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long after he is gone. So began the plastics industry's $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040. Laura Sullivan/NPR We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. These flaws include everything from lack of return on investment to improper handling. "The consumers were confused," Smith says. The public was getting upset. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. "Sounds exactly the same.". It's gold. The bins were now full of trash he couldn't sell. At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. He's retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the time he worked with the plastics industry. "These are products the world needs and continues to need," he says. "This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the '90s. And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in. She sends the soda bottles to the state. hide caption. People may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. It's cheap and durable, and it's a chemical marvel. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the most part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean. All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. "It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what we knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C.". In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to see the industry's new initiative. Its time to implement real solutions, particularly the reduction of single-use plastic food service items that have the highest likelihood of polluting our environment.. Even plastics that do make it to recycling facilities aren't all recycled,the authors report, stating that 30 to 36 percent of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles are wasted during the recycling process. EPA used data from the American Chemistry Council, the National Association for PET Container Resources, and the Association of Plastic Recyclersto measure the recycling of plastic. See definitions of durable goods, nondurable goods, and containers and packaging. However single-use plastics rose and overall use is "projected to pick up again" as the economy rebounds. Metal fares a little better than plastic in terms of recycling. "There was a lot of discussion about how difficult it was to recycle," Thomas remembers. Theres no way to sort our way out of this without reducing waste to start with.. The "viability of the industry and the profitability of your company" are at stake. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington. Laura Sullivan/NPR Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn't true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition. "I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. Shardul Agrawala, the head of the OECD's environment and economy integration division, said Tuesday's report "further accentuates the need for countries to come together to start looking towards a global agreement to address this very important problem. We're willing to bet that the cardboard boxes recycled during the pandemic alone might exceed that amount, though the data is not yet available. Glass, like metal, is much easier to recycle than plastic. 2022 Smithsonian Magazine This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline that includes the documentary Plastic Wars, which aired March 31 on PBS. "They were trying to keep their products on the shelves," Liesemer says. Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is "infeasible. For more comprehensive information, see the 2018Data Tables on the Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Facts and Figures Report page. The plastic food service items are generally made of clear or foamed polystyrene, while trash bags are made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) or low-density polyethylene (LDPE). ", Asked about the priorities of the treaty to be discussed in Nairobi, she said "there is an urgent waste management problem which is responsible for the bulk of the leakage to the environment.". "To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. The Department of Energy also released a research paper this week, which analyzed data from 2019, and came to the same number: only 5% of plastics are being recycled. So Smith allowed people to put two plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. When most people toss a plastic bottle or cup into the recycling bin, they assume that means the plastic is recycled but a new report lays bare how rarely that actually happens. In fact, according to Yale Environment 360, changing regulations in recent years have stalled the process so much that its almost ground to a halt. Cookie Policy Secure .gov websites use HTTPS As it is, that 91 percent just sits in landfills, piling up and breaking down slowly into arguably more dangerous microplastics. At Least 1 Of Them Has To Change To Clean Up Our Mess. unwittingly.". It could be because that's not what they were told. "We are approaching a point of no return.". This was 16.3percent of all MSW combusted with energy recovery that year. But check back in. This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion investment in new plastic. It's also hugely profitable. Please see the EPA Methodology Document for further information on estimating the generation and management of plastics. New plastic bottles come off the line at a plastic manufacturing facility in Maryland. This is valuable.". Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging about recycling plastic. The report comes less than a week before the U.N. This will likely come as no surprise to longtime readers, but according to National Geographic, an astonishing 91 percent of plastic doesnt actually get recycled. And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with top executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should have been obvious all along. "The code is being misused," it says bluntly. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR. But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. hide caption. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for example. It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover. Check out our Frequent Questions page. Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. It funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags. Larry Thomas, the former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side by side with top oil and plastics executives. "The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products," he says. No. We dont have factories to do it. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome.". Unfortunately, until the recycling supply chain is restored, until people start paying closer attention to the items and materials they recycle, and until the world gives up its reliance on hard-to-recycle products like plastic, things may continue to escalate until they reach untenable levels. In one document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington. Copyright 2022 Green Matters. As if that werent enough, nearly all of that plastic that does get recycled is actually downcycled, which means it gets less and less useful every time, eventually becoming so flimsy that it can no longer be recycled properly. And if there was a sign of this future, it's a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the flat skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. "I remember this is one of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years later or however long it's been and it was what we need to do is advertise our way out of it. At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. Much of the plastic recycling in the U.S. was previously outsourced to China, but The Atlantic reports that China no longer accepts most of our recycling. Becker seems earnest. "A degradation of resin properties and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through aging, and in any reclamation process," the report told executives. Recently, an industry advocacy group funded by the nation's largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste. "We've got to do a better job, collecting the waste, sorting it. This was 18.5percent of all MSW landfilled. Plastics stand out as egregiously wasteful in the world of recycling: paper is recycled at 66%, according to the American Forest Products Association, while the figure for aluminum cans is about 50.4%, according to the EPA. According to the Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics report, about 85% of plastic ends up in landfills with 10% incinerated. "We hadn't invested in the ability to sort it and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today.". "We have the people that can change the world," it says to soaring music as people pick up plastic trash and as bottles get sorted in a recycling center. Dell says that solutions exist to replace single-use plastics for example, fiber-based food trays that can be composted or recycled. In 2018, around 46 million tons of paper were sent in for recycling. It's so new that it's still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is free from stains. Sources: Plastics information is from the American Chemistry Council, the National Association for PET Container Resources and The Association of Plastic Recyclers. The researchers on that report wrote that landfilled plastic waste in the United States has been on the rise for many reasons, including low recycling rates, population growth, consumer preference for single-use plastics, and low disposal fees in certain parts of the country, according to a press release. They have co-opted Americas love of recycling and the thought that we are doing something good for the environment, when they knew all along it wasnt recycling, she says. "I understand there is doubt and cynicism. And what's more, the makers of plastic the nation's largest oil and gas companies have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite.
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