As we should all know by now, plastic recycling is a sham. That little recycle symbol on bottles? Invented by a consortium of plastic industry front groups to put the onus on the consumer to fix the problem they’re creating. Just like the personal carbon footprint was.
It can also only be recycled once — the composition of plastic makes it such that when you melt it down, a plastic bag cannot be made into another plastic bag . It can be made into a park bench. And at the end of that park bench’s life, it goes to landfill.
CT: Plastics have used all sorts of deceptive campaigns, including a pseudoscientific study funded by the American Chemistry Council that not-so-shockingly found that reusable cloth shopping bags contain bacteria when someone drips meat juice on them and doesn’t launder them, and tactics like circumventing plastic bag bans by lobbying for a loophole for “reusable bags” that are simply thicker plastic, as they did when Hawaii became the first state in the US to have a comprehensive single-use...
CT: Tell me about more sustainable packaging options and some of the innovations and breakthroughs you’ve seen in recent years.