Even a majority of Republicans support efforts to hold manufacturers accountable for allegedly deceptive claims
Concern about the fossil fuel and plastics industries’ alleged deception about recycling is growing, with new polling showing a majority of American voters, including 54% of Republicans, support legal efforts to hold the sectors accountable.
The industries have faced increasing scrutiny for their role in the global plastics pollution crisis, including an ongoing California investigation and dozens of suits filed over the last decade against consumer brands that sell plastics.
Research published earlier this year found that plastic producers have known for decades that plastic recycling is too cumbersome and expensive to ever become a feasible waste management solution, but promoted it to the public anyway.
Remember in the 70s when the cigarette industry said their products were safe?
Remember in the 80s when the candy industry said it was the lack of exercise that was the cause of overweight?
Remember in the 90s when the gun industry pointed the blame to personal responsibility as the cause of school shootings?
Maybe just maybe industries can’t self regulate. I can go on.
Whistleblowers should be treated like heroes. Like not just protections where the reward is that they get to keep their job working for a company that is probably going to feel hostile towards them, but reward them so that they don’t need to work with that company anymore.
Publically funded science (done in the interest of the public rather than profit for universities or publishers) should also be ramped up so that it has the resources to examine these questions, too.
Also, criminal charges for execs that suppress information that prefers profits over safety.
The CTO of the previous company (1000+ employees , multinational) where I worked as an exec right under the CTO had a habit of not being able to keep his hands to himself. He was married but had a taste for men working under him.
Hed beeen around pulling shit for months until i was called in, i met him in person, he immediately started to “just tickle” me, and I reported his ass right away. Internal investigations were had and they fired him.
But not after allowing him as his final act to fire me because I was “not management material”, had nothing to do with me blowing the whistle on him feeling up his employees. The company allowed him to do this because i was now a risk to them.
So the lesson here is to keep your head down, enable abusers, lest you want your career in the shitter
Edit: I fully agree with you, but the way it currently stands it’s impossible to fight back to high level execs
Sounds like a slam dunk lawsuit my dude.
This is the way. If every company knew firing a whistleblower would result in a successful lawsuit against them, they would not do it anymore.
According to my brother, the real issue is that there is too much regulation and it is stifling the ability of ethical companies to break into industries 🙄
LOL?
I used to laugh at him yeah but he’s managed to fuck up his kids with weird right wing capitalist stuff so it’s less funny now
LOL😞…
Please go on, not that I need convincing, but would like to hear more, idk when was led? 60s?
Pretty sure all those industries continue doing all that shit today
You missed cars. 😁
Legislation on packaging should really be entertained as well. For many products a biodegradable form of packaging would be completely viable.
Impossible, the only appropriate package for our premium scissors is comparably premium clamshell plastic. That you need scissors to open.
Imagine if they sold can openers inside sealed tin cans… And not the kind with the pull tab.
All companies should be required to recycle their own products. No… not via contracts with 3rd parties. Products go back up through the sales channels untill they reach the manufacturers.
If you don’t have an idea how your products end of life works, you cannot sell or manufacture it.
Solves e-waste, plastic, chemicals… a lot of the god awful stuff.
But the Republicans are going to vote for the guy who will sell them down the river Jan 20st 2025.
Fucking.
Morons.
Put a per gram tax on every manufactured product and watch how companies magically find alternative materials/methods to make goods.
You mean: how they will raise prices to account for that.
“They’ll just raise prices” is corporate propaganda. Making them raise prices for carrying on using plastic is the whole point.
Other people will make packaging out of something else, and the people still stubbornly using plastic will see their sales go down.
You just have to make the tax large enough to encourage the use of other materials, and keep raising it once other materials become the norm. Otherwise you just see that 2.5% charge become a 5% price rise and everyone just carries on.
Use to make machines for the plastic industry. None of them wanted tp use recycled plastic, because raw plastic pellets were cheaper and recycled plastic was harsher on the machines.
Recycled plastic is also terrible if you have any type of quality standards you have to meet. You generally end up creating even more scrap because the regrind always has some amount of contamination in it, and never performs the same as virgin.
Yep. When we made recycled units, the bearings got shredded and the drive motors got burnt out faster.
That’s why recycling goes after reduce and reuse.
Recycled plastic is also inferior quality with worse structural properties so it’s not really suitable for many applications.
Yep, regrind was bad.
Not saying anyone shouldn’t recycle. Just saying in our world of cheap is God, why fight?
We need to put some of these CEOs on trial like we did with the Nazi’s hopefully all of them will get their just punishment.
I was just following orders.
Don’t worry, the industry wants looser rules on what can be considered recyclable. They want to be able to label things as recyclable even if the majority of people do not have access to a recycling facility that can recycle it. Fuck them. Honestly, we should force them to be the ones to recycle the plastic if they want to label it as recyclable.
“Most US voters say” AKA Not Gonna Happen.
Yeah we have a government that represents corporations.
I would sooner hold out local municipalities who run the recycling centers and our investigative news agencies for not clearly informing the public that recycling plastic has not been the ecological solution we’ve been promised.
I mean, sure, the plastic producers lied but the recyclers have known about it this entire time too. How this has been such a secret for decades may suggest some deeper conspiracy.
And, if it’s the case that our governments were genuinely unable to know this was an issue, we should be more critical of them for not knowing what other outside agencies are fooling them into using tax-payer dollars against our best interests.
The plastic producers were the ones pushing the grift and controlling the narrative/studies, just like what was done with fossil fuels and climate change (certainly a trend here with the oil industry).
Additionally, they’re the ones that directly benefitted the most so it makes sense to go after their fraudulent gains.
I’m all for being critical of municipalities and elected officials, but the solution is not to bankrupt cities or state/federal funds through litigation. The focus should be on the producers. Go to the top of the chain/follow the money.
Edit: To your point about news conglomerates, that seems more viable and they certainly need better incentives and regulation.
Dude. It’s been 40 years.
I didn’t say news conglomerates. I said investigative news agencies - meaning the local news.
At some point over the past forty years, someone in government and someone at a local news paper has known there was a conspiracy. These people need to be held accountable. They’re the ones who have cost tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Granted, I may be giving too much credit to local government. I don’t think most voters in the country care very much about electing people smart enough to put two and two together.
What I have such a hard time with is that people like yourself are so quick to excuse gullibility. The big powerful plastic company promised us it would be okay. Why would anyone dare question them or their motives? The fossil fuel company certainly has the public and the environment at their best interests. So many people are so quick to shrug and say “not my fault”. Did you even attempt to ask questions or were you afraid that knowing the truth would be bad for your administration?
Oh, totally, the portion I was speaking to was the issue of local news being owned by news conglomerates so that’s where I see the grift coming from, mostly
And if we hold people personally liable, I’m more on board with that. I just would not touch taxpayer dollars for municipal, state, or federal funds with these suits.
local news being owned by news conglomerates
Yeah - I’ve watched the Sinclair segment. I recognize that but that’s not the case everywhere. More troubling is how local newspapers are struggling and going out of business. I’m in Philadelphia where we still have decent locally-owned and/or operated journalism.
I’m not sure how the lawsuit would go down but I’d be open to whatever it takes to make the right changes. Perhaps the threat of digging into city coffers is precisely why nothing has happened in forty years. It’s already costing tax payers millions of dollars every year to not recycle. I’d support millions to hold people accountable and make the needed changes if that means saving us money down the road.
That has to do with fuckery around the term recycling. What normal people have been led to believe is only a very narrow definition of recycling and not what happens in most cases. Burning plastic is considered recycling as the waste is recycled into fuel.
Same with renewable energy… sure the trees you chip down and burn can be regrown… but that is not what people are led to believe is what they are being sold.
This is not on the local municipalities. They where saddled with waste and had to deal with it, they did as good as they could. And many people have been yelling about this since before 2000… It was just ignored untill microplastic where found in the balls and brain.
This along with big oil needs to be dragged infront of a tribunal and higher-ups from the last 40 years need to be held to account. We have room in the Hague.
They where saddled with waste and had to deal with it, they did as good as they could.
FOR FORTY YEARS?!
Seattle doesn’t even accept plastics for recycling, only certain things for cleaning and reuse. They could do a better job in informing the public about it, though, since all of the products still stamp on the recycling symbols, most of which have never been actually recycled.
Also, decades of telling people to separate plastics for recycling into separate plastic types, like lids separate from bottles, undermines reuse because the bottles then get crushed without the lid to keep air inside. And crushing usually damages them too much to be cleaned and reused.
Spokane burns its ordinary trash. It also accepts plastics and other “recyclables” at an every-other-week curbside pick-up, using a separate bin, just as you’d expect. Then they burn it. Yes, just like the trash. But wait, they do the burning at a facility they call the “Waste To Energy” plant, so that makes it all OK.
It’s all a big expensive greenwashing game, but everyone seems perfectly fine with it. La di da di da.
Well, I mean the recycling bins in most cities just gets put in landfills. It used to get shipped to China and put in landfills there, but China stopped taking it now that they don’t have room for it and finally admitted plastic companies were lying about recycling it after lots of investigative reports.
Reuse is best but they really need to educate people and start actually fining people for putting the wrong stuff in the wrong bins if they do it repeatedly. Also, composting should be more widespread in larger areas to reduce waste.
But the biggest problem with burning the garbage is that they don’t properly collect the fumes. It’s expensive to do and would basically negate the income on the electricity produced. Some countries do it right and if done properly and if they are able to do it a lot, then it can be good. But Spokane is like the worst place to do it if you’re not collecting the fumes properly considering the climate and wildfire smoke that is already choking everyone all across the state and beyond. And plastic fumes are especially deadly for people with asthma, not to mention cancer causing. But a lot of cities still allow people to burn their own garbage and so many people burn plastics when they do. It’s horrible.
Ah yes, the fumes. That “Waste To Energy” incinerator is west of town in the area known as “West Plains”, near I90, near the airport, and not far from Fairchild AFB which these days is a locus of refueling operations and other support functions. Huge, 4-engined planes coming and going all day long. Long ago the AF firefighting ops polluted the groundwater there with PFAS chemicals and much of it is no longer fit to drink. Between that, the air pollution from military and civil air operations, and whatever comes out of the stacks at the W2E plant, I have to imagine the denizens of the area have evolved some powerful pollution-resistant genetics. Or maybe they just die young from cancer and respiratory and neurological diseases. Fortunately it’s a pretty low-income zone (think ‘typical military town’ - old skool Bremerton-ish) so all that disease can just be blamed on personal poor decision-making (like the decision to live there). A shame really, West Plains now has a ginormous Amazon warehouse that the residents could slave at (in addition to the super-Wally’s and the casinos) if they’d Just Say No to cancer and all those other tempting diseases.
Yeah. Our city published the recycling restrictions on their website but people still put out stuff that’s not able to be recycled. Specifically, wet or greasy cardboard. They should send out flyers every year.
And they should educate in schools like they did in the 80s/90s when I was a kid, but give the real information. But without the plastics companies paying for that, it’s unlikely. Schools barely have enough money for the basics.
In my area, we have a small landfill bin, a larger recycling bin, and an even larger compost bin, all collected weekly. We have to put all food scraps in the compost. They also take greasy cardboard (pizza boxes, etc) in the compost. The compost is handled at a local composting center and residents can go there and get the resulting processed compost for free to use in their gardens :)
As a fellow Seattlite…that’s simply not true. Seattle accepts plastics.
https://seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-and-disposal/recycling/recycle-right
“…for recycling.” Seattle does not accept plastics for melting down and recycling, only for cleaning and reuse. If you’re putting all plastics with a recycling symbol in your bin, then you really should check out the “Where Does it Go” tool on the website. https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-and-disposal/where-does-it-go
If you look through most of the plastics sections, if the item is not cleanable and reusable, most of the time it says to put it in the garbage bin. If you browse the site a bit you’ll see that they specifically mention that since China stopped taking “recyclables”, there is a lot less that can go in the recycling bin and it basically says to ignore the labels on plastics and instead go based on the reusability based on the function of the item rather than the material.
(Sure I probably shouldn’t blanket say that there is no type of plastic that they recycle, but for the average person who hasn’t worked in the plastics industry and doesn’t understand the difference between PVC and polyethylene for example, it’s best to just use the general rule of thumb that if it’s broken it goes in the garbage because it’s not getting melted down, reformulated, and made into a new, lower quality product in 99%+ of cases. People shouldn’t have to think that hard to know what bin to put it in, so it’s best to toss it if you aren’t sure. Otherwise we just increase the costs for everyone when more sorting and disposal has to happen at the recycling plant.)
I never said I’m putting all plastics in the bin. I know which can and cannot be recycled. You falsely said that Seattle does not accept plastic for recycling. End of story.
I’m the one who linked you their rules.
Yes, it should be easier. But that’s the case everywhere.
I specifically said “for recycling”.
And that is what this article is about. Not about cleaning and reuse, which can be done by anyone, but melting down and recycling which takes specialized equipment and a market for the reduced quality recycled materials, in addition to the expense of sorting and cleaning to reduce contamination.
Seattle does not recycle plastics nor does any recycling company in the US with the exception of a very small subset of materials which are primarily from industrial sources, not consumers.
It goes in the recycling bin. You said Seattle does not accept plastic for recycling. That is false. What they do with it after that is a different story. But you were basically telling people not to recycle any plastics in Seattle, against Seattle’s recommended policy.
But the entire point of this article was about “recycling”, not “reuse”. And “recycling” means breaking something down and making something new out of it, not cleaning and reselling for reuse which requires that the items are intact and cleanable. Seattle does not do that with plastics and thus does not “recycle” them. So as I keep stating Seattle does not accept plastics “for recycling”. Which is a true statement that can be verified on their website.
And reuse is not what the original article is talking about and thus not relevant. Most recycling companies process plastics “for reuse”. None in the US accept them “for recycling” (with the exception of some industrial sources) and never have since the beginning of the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” program in the US. They have always shipped that material elsewhere and those places have just thrown them in landfills. Which is the whole point of this article and discussion.
Significantly reducing our reliance on plastics cannot be taken on as a single issue or at the local or even national level.
Plastics are a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry.
That’s the only reason materials which were marketed to people as miraculous in the 40s, 50s and 60s are so cheap.
The extraction industry is global, and the production of plastics is as well.
Even if one nation reduced its fossil fuel and plastic consumption significantly, there will be other nations that will take the opportunity to get that cheap energy, materials and industry.
Global solutions are nice to ask for, but not forthcoming. We can start by investing in alternatives at the local/national level, encouraging others to do the same, and advocating to grow an alternative way of living that is less extractive and more respectful. Ideas can spread quite quickly, if the conditions are right. A global switch isn’t possible immediately. Infrastructure must be planned. International economic planning and international cooperation are low right now. Even intranational cooperation is low.
Cooperation grows from the bottom up, and we need to find something locally/nationally to agree on and cooperate over. Plastics and recycling being a unifying issue is hopeful to report, and is something that can be tackled at the local level. I have greatly reduced my own plastic consumption (it’s not zero) and saved money doing it. Plastic products are usually expensive conveniences. Now I spend my days cleaning instead of just tossing and moving on. A part of the problem is that living well requires labor, and our society forces us to sell all of our labor energy to make a boss rich and pay us pennies. Further, we all live in atomized, nuclear units that must be self-reliant, which requires more labor to meet needs compared to the economies of scale involved with community-pooled labor to meet shared needs like food (a major source of plastics waste).
Previously, western society supported this structure via sexual segregation where one sex provided the labor to live well, and the other provided the labor donated to capitalism in exchange for the family unit being allowed to live. Then, the sex whose job it was to help us live well realized that they were being oppressed in this scenario, since they were being denied many basic rights of citizenship such as being seen as a person by society. They were tricked by the capitalists to demand that they may also donate their labor to the invisible hand in exchange for something closer to full citizenship. This creates a domestic labor vacuum that prevents pay parity. Domestic labor needs are being suppressed by convenience plastic use. The need for someone to do domestic labor causes women to fall back into this role due to the structural vacuum. Convenience plastics use is required to support the lack of time available now that Bosses demand double the labor from each family unit compared to the 1960s. Dropping plastics increases domestic labor requirements which exacerbates the sexual labor vacuum and pay gap. I see a local/national need to fix sexual issues as blocking a fix for our plastics addiction in the west. Abstracting the problematic societal structures around sex, calling them gender, and then breaking their rules is the current strategy to free ourselves.
I disagree, but this is a cool reply and you should keep posting like this.
Plastic recycling is a farce to make it appear as a “personal responsibility” issue.
Notice also how the labeling for plastics uses a sign that looks remarkably similar to a recycling logo - whether that specific type of plastic is actually recyclable or not.
It is all a public relation campaign, because fundamentally plastic is unsustainable and harmful. Governments have collectively shat the bed by placing the burden of dealing with plastic on the consumer. (This is very similar to the “carbon footprint” idea - which was a creation of the oil industry.)
I toured the place where my city collects its plastic recycling - the director in charge was very open about the fact that most of it isn’t used and can’t really be used anyway.
I mean, i get it, recycled plastic is harder to handle, etc. etc. But burning them for energy is no business?
In think plastic recycling is true and makes sense to do. I do it every week. However, all the plastic users need to act to limit it’s use to functionality based requirements…can anything at all be used instead of plastic in this situation??? There’s like 0 need to use plastic to box and ship things. Are you shipping an optic? Glass? A large flat TV? Okay there you should use plastics. Those plastics could be reusable first but also recyclable and the people selling the TV should be responsible for paying for the packaging to eventually get recycled. A watermelon 🍉 is way more fragile than a TV and we don’t box those things. Only Costco has the brains to box fruit individually. That’s just a waste.
