“How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled” is the headline to an important NPR investigation.
The story, published in September, is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline that includes the documentary “Plastic Wars,” which aired March 31 on PBS. It is available here: https://tinyurl.com/pbsPlasticWars
The Sierra Club has long fought against the flood of plastics, notably the single-use variety, but has since expanded it to an AddUp Campaign to “stand up to protect public health over plastic industry fear-mongering.”
“Plastics are made from fossil fuels. As the oil and gas industry is being pushed back by clean energy, they'll do anything to make sure that creating the petrochemicals for single-use plastics continues to make a profit,” according to the Sierra Club. Act here: https://tinyurl.com/PlasticsCampaign
The lead paragraphs to NPR Reporter Laura Sullivan’s story are:
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.
None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is buried.
"To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."
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. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.
But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it.
"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. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It's gold. This is valuable."
But it's not valuable, and it never has been. 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.
Read the rest of the story here: https://tinyurl.com/nprPlasticScandal