Jan Dell, who used to be a chemical engineer, has spoken out against the lies that plastic companies tell. It is estimated that the United States produces 48 million tons of plastic garbage every year, but only 5 to 6 percent of that is recycled.
“So many people, they see the recyclable label, and they put it in the recycle bin,” he said. “But the vast majority of plastics are not recycled.”
The goal of Dell’s non-profit, The Last Beach Cleanup, is to fight plastic waste. From what she said, those lines going around don’t always mean that the package will be recycled. She said that the recycle sign was created in 1988 to show that plastic trash wasn’t a problem because it could be recycled.
A new report called “Fraud of Plastic Recycling” says that the plastics business is lying about how well plastic recycling works and trying to trick people.
Allen says, “They could never lie about the fact that there was plastic waste…”However, they made up a lie about how to fix it, which was recycling.
“The plastics industry knows that selling recycling sells plastic, and they’ll say pretty much anything they need to say to keep doing that,” he said when asked why the industry pushes recycling if it doesn’t make financial sense. That’s how they earn money.
Most plastics can’t be recycled because they are made of oil and gas, which can’t all be recycled at the same time. Plastic manufacturers were afraid of being banned, so they came up with recycling as a way to save their business.
They saw recycling as a “public relations problem” instead of a technical problem that they needed to fix, Allen said. These results show that recycling plastic is not working, he said.
