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Yves here. Avery much loved but now retired NC writer, Jerri-Lynn, would no doubt be excoriating the scheme described below if she were still posting here. One of her beats was the war on plastic. She spent a lot of time in what those in the US would sniff at as being lower income countries. One of the upsides of that was seeing that their use of plastic, particularly in packaging, was vastly lower than in America and Europe.
But the new push is to designate plastic that is no way, no how recyclable on an economically affordable as technically recyclable and so fine to put in recycling bins, and otherwise con consumers that their use is benign. Mind you, there is already a widespread problem with consumers not sorting trash properly, as well as buildings simply dumping items place in a recycling container in the general trash. This was true in my NYC apartment building and clearly the case in the building I now reside in.
By Lisa Song, who reports on the environment, energy, and climate change for ProPublica. Originally published at ProPublica; cross posted from Undark
Most of the products in the typical kitchen use plastics that are virtually impossible to recycle.
The film that acts as a lid on Dole Sunshine fruit bowls, the rings securing jars of McCormick dried herbs, the straws attached to Juicy Juice boxes, the bags that hold Cheez-Its and Cheerios — they’re all destined for the dumpster.
Now a trade group representing those brands and hundreds more is pressuring regulators to make plastic appear more environmentally friendly, a proposal experts say could worsen a crisis that is flooding the planet and our bodies with the toxic material.
The Consumer Brands Association believes companies should be able to stamp “recyclable” on products that are technically “capable” of being recycled, even if they’re all but guaranteed to end up in a landfill. As ProPublica previously reported, the group argued for a looser definition of “recyclable” in written comments to the Federal Trade Commission as the agency revises the Green Guides — guidelines for advertising products with sustainable attributes.
The association’s board of directors includes officials from some of the world’s richest companies, such as PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Land O’Lakes, Keurig Dr Pepper, Hormel Foods Corporation, Molson Coors Beverage Company, Campbell Soup, Kellanova, Mondelez International, Conagra Brands, J.M. Smucker and Clorox.
Some of the companies own brands that project health, wellness, and sustainability. That includes General Mills, owner of Annie’s macaroni and cheese; The Honest Co., whose soaps and baby wipes line the shelves at Whole Foods; and Colgate-Palmolive, which owns the natural deodorant Tom’s of Maine.
ProPublica contacted the 51 companies on the association’s board of directors to ask if they agreed with the trade group’s definition of “recyclable.” Most did not respond. None said they disagreed with the definition. Nine companies referred ProPublica back to the association.
“The makers of America’s household brands are committed to creating a more circular economy which is why the industry has set sustainability goals and invested in consumer education tools” with “detailed recycling instructions,” Joseph Aquilina, the association’s vice president and deputy general counsel, wrote in an email.
The Green Guides are meant to increase consumer trust in sustainable products. Though these guidelines are not laws, they serve as a national reference for companies and other government agencies for how to define terms like “compostable,” “nontoxic,” and “recyclable.” The Federal Trade Commission is revising the guides for the first time since 2012.
Most of the plastic we encounter is functionally not recyclable. It’s too expensive or technically difficult to deal with the health risks posed by the dyes and flame retardants found in many products. Collecting, sorting, storing, and shipping the plastic for reprocessing often costs much more than plowing it into a landfill. Though some newer technologies have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, these plastic-recycling techniques are inefficient and exist in such limited quantities that experts say they can’t be relied upon. The reality is, only 5 percent of Americans’ discarded plastic gets recycled. And while soda bottles and milk jugs can be turned into new products, other common forms of plastic, like flimsy candy wrappers and chip bags, are destined for trash heaps and oceans, where they can linger for centuries without breaking down.
The current Green Guides allow companies to label products and packaging as “recyclable” if at least 60 percent of Americans have access to facilities that will take the material. As written, the guidelines don’t specify whether it’s enough for the facilities to simply collect and sort the items or if there needs to be a reasonable expectation that the material will be made into something new.
“The Green Guides have long set forth that items labeled as ‘recyclable’ are those which are capable of being recycled,” Aquilina, the association vice president, told ProPublica. “Any characterization suggesting Consumer Brands is pushing for a ‘looser definition’ is false.”
But the association seemed to disregard what the FTC said in a separate document released alongside the guides, which states that a truthful recyclable claim means that “a substantial majority of consumers or communities have access to facilities that will actually recycle, not accept and ultimately discard, the product.”
In its comments to the FTC, the association pushed back on that idea. The U.S. recycling system is decentralized, and manufacturers have no control over economic factors that might lead a recycler to change its mind about how it handles a certain type of plastic, the association wrote, adding that it was unrealistic to force brands to predict which products will be “ultimately recycled.”
The association represents sellers and will naturally seek more flexibility in its positions, Jef Richards, a professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University, said in an email. The “problem with defining ‘recyclable’ as anything that MIGHT be recycled is that I seriously doubt that’s how consumers define it.”
When consumer expectations fail to match what the advertiser is saying, “consumers are being deceived,” he added.
That deception has concrete impacts: Plastic bags that mistakenly end up at recycling centers can gum up machinery, start fires, and contaminate bales of paper, which then can’t be recycled. The problem could get worse if the FTC listens to the Consumer Brands Association and allows companies to market plastic bags as “recyclable.”
Annie’s mac and cheese is one of the brands under the association’s umbrella that has a reputation for health and sustainability. Unlike most pasta companies, Annie’s avoids using plastic film to create windows in its pasta boxes. The brand also sells cheese crackers packaged in plastic that is clearly labeled as nonrecyclable, with a diagonal slash through the triangular “chasing arrows” symbol. Its parent company, General Mills, however, has promoted store drop-off recycling programs for one of its granola bar brands, Nature Valley. A Bloomberg News investigation found these programs have a spotty record, with much of the plastic ending up at landfills. The CEO of General Mills is a member of the association’s executive committee. Earlier this year, the investment firm Green Century filed a shareholder resolution asking General Mills to investigate how it could reduce its use of plastic packaging. The resolution also suggested that the company assess the effectiveness of drop-off recycling programs.
The Honest Co. similarly cultivates a sustainable reputation, including by avoiding two particularly problematic types of plastic in its packaging. Its website provides instructions on how to dispose of plastic packaging; product pages tell consumers to disassemble and rinse out containers and to “check with your local municipality for recyclability acceptance.” Tom’s of Maine uses similar language in fine print on its “first-of-its-kind recyclable toothpaste tube.” The tubes show the familiar chasing arrows recycling symbol accompanied by the words, “Once empty, replace cap and recycle.” Small letters on the edge of the tube read, “Your community may not yet accept tubes for recycling. Check locally.”
But regulators have warned that “check locally” caveats are vague. The Environmental Protection Agency told the FTC last year that the warning “has little value in assessing recyclability” and said companies should use clearer instructions to reduce “wishcycling” — tossing things into a curbside bin with the faint hope that they will get recycled. A group of state attorneys general suggested using more aggressive language: “NOT ROUTINELY RECYCLED — Please check with your local jurisdiction.”
“We’re proud of the leading role we’ve played in transforming tube packaging,” Rob Robinson, a marketing executive at Tom’s of Maine, said in an email. A “check locally” caveat appears on the toothpaste tube, the outer carton, and the company website, he said.
Miriam Holsinger, co-president of Minnesota-based Eureka Recycling, said not every sorting center has the right equipment or staff training to recycle these tubes. “Until all toothpaste tubes are recyclable, it’s just not something that you can easily do.”
General Mills, The Honest Co., and Colgate-Palmolive didn’t return requests for comment.
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The increasing use of plastics is driven in part by fracking. It has become far cheaper than paper and glass; this is very noticeable in the kitchen. Fracking produces ethane along with methane and is a feedstock for plastics. Huge investments have been made in plastics because feedstock is dirt cheap, since ethane to be gotten rid of. And public money is handed out to the petrochemical industry to build more plants. No higher use than plastic, right? J-LS often linked to DeSmog on the subject of plastics. This is an interesting DeSmog link with a library of articles on the subject:
Fracking for Plastics
Recycling, like renewables is sadly performance art or outright deception. Our county has single stream recycling where huge bins are dumped up and over into the separate hopper on the garbage truck. How much of this wet, broken, shredded, mixture of plastic, paper, glass and metal can possibly be used? Most likely ends up in the massive incinerator.
Yes, the fracking aspect is driving a whole new product stream from the look of it. The other day I happened on a “Stone Paper Waterproof Notebook.” According to their website (https://stonepaperinfo.com/), their paper is a sustainable alternative that uses no trees, water, dyes, or bleaches, and s has less associated air and water pollution.
Doesn’t that sound great? Except, it sounds *too* great. What is holding their “paper” together? High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) resin, the plastic that gets the number 2 in the little recycling symbol. There is no indication how this “paper” would be collected for recycling, although I suppose as long as you stuck to water-soluble ink and graphite, you could just wash it off and reuse it.
But the real point is, they insist how their “stone paper” which is actually specially coated plastic, is more sustainable and better for the environment. Well, so long as we ignore how the feedstock for the HDPE is made and acquired. It was also a clever person who years ago came up with the idea of referring to plastics as “synthetic resins” and then conveniently forgetting the modifier “synthetic.”
Yes, recycling is largely a scam..there are only about three plastics that are economically worth recycling, in the same is true of everything else…It’s performance art….
I’m skeptical about the entire recycling business. (One big reason is that, outside of the performative aspects, recycling does not fit the neoliberal paradigm.) If one considers the complete lack of discussion of reusable packaging one might get the idea that those promoting “recycling” have profits and managing awareness in mind rather than the environment. Many of our states don’t even have bottle deposits.
I’m skeptical too. I would have thought that here in Oz we would be doing a lot of recycling but not that long ago it was discovered that we were packing our rubbish into sea containers and shipping them to Asian countries for them to deal with. In the cities I see that household are being given more and more colour-lidded bins so that they can sort their own rubbish into those separate bins but I do wonder if in the end they all end up in the same landfill. Down in Sydney they are making putting out your garbage into an actual science-
https://www.innerwest.nsw.gov.au/live/waste-and-recycling/designing-and-building-guidelines/residential-shared-bins
What a great use of “recycled” (I assume) plastic! More home “recycling” bins /s.
The very word is redundant and should be just “cycling.” A framing to make cycling more confusing as if living in these times is not confusing enough.
“I’m skeptical about the entire recycling business.”
It depends on what you’re recycling. Recycling of metals has been well-established practice for decades that has clear environment benefits. Notably, it reduces the damaging mining and energy-intensive refining operations required to obtain metals from ores. [For aluminum, it’s at least a 25-to-1 energy savings.] There are lots of companies out there that will pay you for scrap metal, given that it’s so much cheaper to recycle than dig out of the ground.
Recycling long-fiber papers (like kraft paper and cardboard) is also viable, though there is quality degradation as the longer fibers break down. Eventually the fibers get too short to re-use, but at least they’re biodegradable.
Glass can be effectively recycled, though there is little energy savings in doing so. Washing and re-using glass would be much better, but we seem to have abandoned that practice.
And plastics? Sigh… Here, your skepticism is entirely warranted. Even if all participants did their jobs flawlessly there would be quality degradation, and with today’s flawed and haphazard processes, it’s an utter mess. Useless theater at best.
Fair point regarding metals. Regarding cardboard, what if the consumer took care to preserve the (let’s say) shipping box which could then be reused as opposed to recycled? This idea might have enough positive economic potential to warrant a version of the “deposit” type strategy.
A “deposit” type strategy for cardboard boxes? That’s an intriguing possibility.
I order most of my computer equipment used on eBay, and it almost always arrives in a reused/repurposed cardboard box. So box reuse is happening in places already. But there is undoubtedly room for more. My wife and I make a “cardboard box run” to the local transfer station about once a month to dump surplus cardboard into the cardboard-specific recycling container they’ve provided. But it would be much better if those boxes were actually reused.
When I was peddling merch on eBay I always shipped in reused boxes. The economics required it. All it takes is walking the streets of NYC on recycling pickup days to truly understand the potential supply of reusable boxes.
This. I’m in the process of helping my Dad clean out his home of 45 years. A surprising amount of stuff has re-sale value since Mom was a shopaholic and they both were well organized hoarders. Re-used boxes, envelopes, and packaging material are absolutely required or a lot of stuff becomes too expensive to sell profitably. My living room has stacks of boxes, piles of envelopes, and
trash bags of bubble wrap, peanuts, and paper packaging.
Don’t forget that the companies that haul the recycling (like WM and Republic Services) are also the same ones that own the landfills, which make money off the volume that they dispose of. Unless the recyclables are highly profitable, think metals and corrugated cardboard, they will make more money landfilling the waste that recycling it.
The local scrap metal guy quit collecting last month because of low prices (recession indicator?) I thought a cracked 300 pound disassembled cast iron stove would have been worth his time, but not now.
For real? This worries me, but I haven’t yet distilled exactly why. How unrepairable? My northern New England sensibilities are piqued.
It’s a 43 year old Jotul 118. It has casting reliefs of reindeer on the emameled sides. There are hanging cast iron plates on the inside to protect the sides. It seems that small imperfections caused minor cracks to form. I applied furnace cement which worked for awhile, but the cracks grew. Cast iron cannot be easily welded; it must be heated to high temperatures to weld. RIP.
I know that stove. Made in Maine if my memory serves me well. Usable outdoors? My dad boiled syrup on a busted wood stove in the driveway.
It sounds like missing knowledge to me that recycling plastics, even done expertly, results in quality degradation when mountains of plastic pollution just sit there forever. Slowly dissolving into micro plastics polluting every living thing. Or is it that recycling processes actually create more and worse pollution even faster than an ocean gyre or a dump yard? That means sequestering is better than incinerating or re-manufacturing. Is our expertise such a blunt instrument that we are stuck with plastic pollution? So if we managed to contain plastic pollution and control the natural result by collecting the micro plastics would we have something useful? Just curious. Turn all those giant open pit mines into plastic composting farms.
You may have a point. The problem is that that would bring “use reduction” into focus as volume becomes the foremost concern. This, of course would cause offense to those who’s rice bowls depend on ever increasing usage.
The co-opting of the recycling symbol and resulting shenanigans is described from about the 17:45 mark here.
(Frankly I’m amazed Youtube enabled me to find this video via its current terrible search function. I remembered watching this on Nebula a while back before Nebula were not exactly transparent with me and I cancelled them immediately.)
“In its comments to the FTC, the association pushed back on that idea. The U.S. recycling system is decentralized, and manufacturers have no control over economic factors that might lead a recycler to change its mind about how it handles a certain type of plastic, the association wrote, adding that it was unrealistic to force brands to predict which products will be ‘ultimately recycled.’ ”
…And thereby undercutting the association’s entire reasoning and revealing their true intentions–“We don’t wanna make more recyclable packaging.” The responsibility for recyclable packaging has always been with the manufacturers, not recyclers, not consumers. But trade groups like this have been extremely successful in making us all think that this is “our” problem and not “their” problem. Companies like Annie’s and Tom’s of Maine changing their thinking and taking action are a start and stand as an example.
Are companies like Annie’s and Tom’s of Maine “changing their thinking” or merely “marketing”? For instance, Lawsuit over brand’s recyclability claims continues, from this past February. Quote, Filed by three consumers in August 2023, the complaint argues that marketing the tubes as recyclable is “false and misleading” because only a “miniscule” number of recycling facilities actually accept them for recycling. It also alleges the recyclability marketing is in violation of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Green Guides, which regulate how environmental claims can be made about products.
As the author mentioned, Tom’s is owned by Colgate.
In my opinion, all manufacturers should be required to accept the return of their end-of-life products, at no charge, be they packaging to appliances.
Yes, this could be a mechanism to “encourage” reuse.
The trashman cometh every Tuesday and the blue, green and brown bins all get picked up and into the landfill they go as one.