A portion of plastic bottle found on
Mothecombe Beach at the mouth of the Erme Estuary in South Devon, England, on
May 30, 2019. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
July 20 2019, 12:30 p.m.
THE STUDENTS AT Westmeade Elementary School worked hard on their
dragon. And it paid off. The plastic bag receptacle that the kids painted green
and outfitted with triangular white teeth and a “feed me” sign won the students
from the Nashville suburb first place in a recycling box decorating contest.
The idea, as Westmeade’s proud principal told a local TV news show, was to help the environment. But the real
story behind the dragon — as with much of the escalating war over plastic
waste — is more complicated.
The contest was sponsored by A Bag’s Life, a recycling promotion and education effort of the
American Progressive Bag Alliance, a lobbying group that fights restrictions on
plastic. That organization is part of the Plastics Industry Association, a trade
group that includes Shell Polymers, LyondellBasell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron
Phillips, DowDuPont, and Novolex — all of which profit hugely from the
continued production of plastics. And even as A Bag’s Life was
encouraging kids to spread the uplifting message of cleaning up plastic waste,
its parent organization, the American Progressive Bag Alliance, was backing a
state bill that would strip Tennesseans of their ability to
address the plastics crisis. The legislation would make it illegal for local
governments to ban or restrict bags and other single-use plastic products — one
of the few things shownto actually reduce plastic waste.
A week after Westmeade’s dragon won
the contest, the APBA got its own reward: The plastic preemption bill passed
the Tennessee state legislature. Weeks later, the governor signed it into
law, throwing a wrench into an effort underway in Memphis to charge a
fee for plastic bags. Meanwhile, A Bag’s Life gave the Westmeade kids who
worked on the bag monster a $100 gift card to use “as they please.” And
with that, a minuscule fraction of its vast wealth, the plastics industry
applied a green veneer to its increasingly bitter and desperate fight to keep
profiting from a product that is polluting the world.
A Bag’s Life is just one small part
of a massive, industry-led effort now underway to suppress meaningful efforts
to reduce plastic waste while keeping the idea of recycling alive. The reality
of plastics recycling? It’s pretty much already dead. In 2015, the U.S.
recycled about 9 percent of its plastic waste, and since then the number has
dropped even lower. The vast majority of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic
ever produced — 79 percent — has ended up in landfills or scattered all
around the world. And as for those plastic shopping bags the kids were hoping
to contain: Less than 1 percent of the tens of billions of plastic bags used in the U.S. each year are
recycled.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t
try to properly dispose of the array of toys, single-use clamshells, bottles,
bags, takeout containers, iced coffee cups, straws, sachets, yogurt tubs, pouches,
candy bar wrappers, utensils, chip bags, toiletry tubes, electronics, and lids
for everything that passes through our lives daily. We have to. But we are well
past the point where the heartfelt efforts of schoolchildren or anyone else on
the consumer end can solve the plastics problem. It no longer matters how many
hoots we give. There is already way too much plastic that won’t decompose and
ultimately has nowhere to go, whether it’s mashed into a dragon container or
not.
A Chinese worker walks past piles of
plastic bottles at a plastic bottle recycling station in Ji’nan city, in east
China’s Shandong province, on May 4, 2017.
Photo: Imaginechina via AP Images
China’s National Sword
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
