Plastic Recycling - Sarah Seeliger

 The Limits of Plastic Recycling 

The article I read was about how the public was misled by oil companies like Exxon as well as plastic companies about the recyclability of plastic. According to the article, there are two main problems with recycling plastic: it's expensive and it's inefficient. Another problem with recycling plastic is that since plastic degrades with each use, something made out of recycled plastic can only be used once or twice. This problem has been going on for decades, and in all that time, only 10% of plastic has actually been recycled.

The article says that advertisements for recycling plastic started showing up in the 1990s. These ads sent the message that every piece of plastic gets recycled when really, most of it just gets buried, burned, or dumped into the ocean. These ads were payed for by the plastic industry, which primarily consists of oil companies like Chevron, DuPont, and Exxon. Despite these ads saying that all plastic gets recycled, there are loads of documents from as far back as the 1970s saying otherwise. One paper found at Syracuse in April 1973 said that recycling plastic on a large scale was unlikely. These documents echo the fact that sorting and recycling is expensive and time consuming. 

Advertising made by the plastic industry continued to mislead the public about the recyclability of plastic, which led to more plastic being recycled. An example of this is the $50 million dollar per year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic. The plastic industry also funded things like sorting centers and nonprofits to promote recycling. Most of these projects failed by the mid 90s. The reasons that these projects failed was expense and lack of infrastructure. 

Despite all of the problems regarding recycling, there was one man who decided to try something new. Coy Smith ran a recycling business in San Diego, and he decided to allow people to put only soda bottles and milk jugs in their recycling bins.  Despite his efforts, people began to put all kinds of different plastics in his bins. This was due to the new recycling symbol that was created. This symbol led people to believe that they could recycle things that were trash because they had the symbol on them. 

At the end of the day, plastic is still an essential part of our everyday lives, but we need to create changes to make it more eco friendly. 



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