While writing my third paper on recycling stoppages in my local county and how that connects to global issues, I stumbled across this video from the YouTube channel Climate Town. As an aside, their videos are fantastic, and I strongly recommend binge watching all of them. Self-described as "Rollie Williams and a ragtag team of climate communicators, creatives and comedians are here to examine climate change in a way that doesn’t make you want to eat a cyanide pill," they break down a variety of different issues in a way that is visceral and informative while also being entertaining. It also seems much more targeted to younger generations and I think videos like theirs are much more effective at reaching mass audiences than more traditional methods like written papers and studies.
This particular video cuts to the core of perceptions of plastic recycling in America and quickly paints a picture of how the plastics industry has tricked the masses into ignoring the consequences of our rampant consumption of plastic products. It walks through the history of the scaled-up commercial introduction of these products and how the plastics industry has been there, every step of the way, to manipulate the public via a variety of measures to ensure that people continue unabated purchasing of their products. Through things like farcical ad campaigns, the co-opting of the recycle symbol into the resin identification code (RIC) symbol, heavy and broad government lobbying, and bad-faith investments in recycling programs, the industry has kept the US public largely unaware or uninterested in the negative consequences of plastic use. They've even succeeded in tricking generations of people into thinking they're doing the right thing by sorting through their waste and picking out things with the RIC on it to recycle, even though the vast majority of those items will never be reprocessed in that way. An audio clip the video plays (twice) from the President of the Society of the Plastics Industry sums this up well when he says, "if the public thinks that recycling is working, then they're not going to be as concerned about the environment."
Even as someone who had known about the RIC imitation of the recycling symbol and how they're not the same thing, the depth and breadth of the plastic industry's manipulation is a punch in the gut. Here we have yet another example of where the greed of a small group of people has set our society on a completely unsustainable path that will have consequencies to be paid by future generations for decades, if not centuries. What's more concering is that this particlar veil is still pulled over the eyes of millions of people in the country, so traction to reverse these outcomes seems nearly impossible. The only means that I think have a chance of changing things for the better are the implementation of concepts like the circular economy and extended producer responsibility, but these efforts will also fail in this country if they're allowed to be altered in any way by the offending industries, like plastics in this case. The historical lesson that must be learned here is that their tendrils have to be completely removed from any means of providing change for the public good in order to prevent these kinds of schemes from further perpetuating problems.