Is this the story about the thing that the public and scientists knew was extremely harmful for decades before the company that makes the harmful thing finally admits it knew all along too and will do nothing to stop it?
The report unveils the fraudulent marketing and public education campaigns used to promote plastic as recyclable, despite knowing that it is not a workable solution.
These strategies allowed the single-use plastics industry to expand, while avoiding regulation to effectively address waste and pollution, the report says.
“Recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of,” reads a 1986 report by industry trade group the Vinyl Institute (VI).
The only reason we have plastics is b cause they can be made from the byproducts of oil refining.
The only reason we’re hearing about how you can’t actually recycle plastics and they’re permanent poisons now is because the oil party’s looking to wind down and all the crazy crap we do with plastic has got to wind down too.
Oil consumption tracks consumption more broadly. Consumption tends to increase in stable times and decrease during unstable times. Climate change is already causing instability.
The most oil gets consumed when all the wagies are in their cagies. Instability because of climate change, weird recessions, wars (although wars also mean massive upticks in consumption but also sabotage and trade embargoes so that balance out or results in a net increase) etc. makes it so people consume less oil.
It’s worth recognizing here that one of the biggest oil products, gasoline, isn’t really a durable good like all the other comoddities. Gas has a shelf life. Don’t believe me? Go start that mower on the half tank it still has from mid fall.
So there’s this huge component of the oil refining output that has basically predictable demand and goes bad if it sets too long.
Oh and the refinery system in most of the world is designed to operate more or less continuously. It’s how you can get a gallon of volitiles refined from oil pumped out of the ground that meet a relatively strict set of criteria for $4.23. Economy of scale and no downtime!
So if you knew there would be less demand in the future for oil products and wanted to most efficiently (and profitably!) lower your output you’d slowly shut down parts of the supply until what’s left can operate 24/7 maximum efficiency (and profitability!).
But there’s the problem of the very durable outputs of oil production like different weird plastics. They’re cheap and people are gonna want more plastic stuff because the same instability that you’re spinning down production over is gonna actually put pressure on manufacturers to make more creative use of affordable plastics in their designs.
So now you gotta get some slack in the plastic supply. You know what’s about the most low margin shit ever? Packaging!
So we’re getting articles admitting it about recycling (which is true).
This makes me think about how there may come a future where there are humans living near the ruins of a once technologically advanced civilization like some sort of RPG setting, but instead of leaving cool buildings and resilient technological marvels behind, it's just piles of rotting toxic plastic everywhere
The dark souls poision swamp only it is made out of discarded disney memorabilia
How many points on the board for "It turns out individual consumer choice is actually a facade to prevent the political feasibility of making producers responsible for the entire life cycle of their products" does that make?
Shocking!
I know we all knew this, but reports like this are actually really necessary and will be really important in the future when people look back on our time and stuff like this shows them how embarrassing we are for making all these excuses for the terror
Picture the triangle of ‘chasing arrows’ symbol to denote that packaging is recyclable, for example. This was introduced even though the VI had noted that the system was unlikely to work due to the trend towards composite containers, made up of multiple types of plastic.
So plastic recycling could work but only if producers committed to it.
thanks hexbear
