THE IDEA of recycling plastic is so seductive that even many well-meaning environmentalists can't resist it. But plastic recycling is a fantasy, a fraud, a scam perpetrated by the plastics industry to keep people buying their disposable products. The city of Oakland has already been complicit 11 this conspiracy by collecting plastic containers in its recycling program. Now, in an otherwise laudable new city purchasing policy presented by Councilmember Sheila Jordan to the council's Finance Committee on Dec. 7, Oakland may expand its participation in the hoax by adding plastic products to the list of recycled goods it would emphasize buying.
Let's be clear here, because sloppy language breeds sloppy thinking, and both are used for political manipulation. To "recycle" means to make a bottle from a bottle, paper from paper.
This is never done with plastic. A plastic bottle is not remade brio a bottle. At best, it is "reused" for another purpose. But even that reuse is extremely limited because every time plastic is melted down, its molecular composition changes, its quality degrades, and the range of its usefulness shrinks. The plastic soda bottle you leave for curbside recycling tray be shredded and used for sleeping bag insulation or carpet fibers, but after that it's headed for a landfill.
Compare that to glass, metal, and paper, items that can be recycled many times over, and if they eventually land in a dump still won't be around to greet the next millennium.
That's why Berkeley's Ecology Center, the pioneer of urban recycling, does not accept plastic in its curbside collection program. Americans were starting to get lip to the petroleum by-product's anti-environmental qualities, the Ecology Center's information coordinator, Karen Pickett, told me. So a few years ago the industry began spending millions of dollars ($20 million per year according to the industry trade group, the American Plastics Council) on commercials telling us plastic is now recyclable.
"People want to do the tight thing, so the way for the industry to get them to use plastic containers instead of metal or glass is to convince them it's recyclable," Pickett said.
Unchallenged, the propaganda is working. Go to your local store and try to find a glass soda bottle today.
So where does all that plastic you leave on your curbside go? The three companies that collect it in Oakland sell the stuff to brokers - at a sizable loss. Neil Cutler, a spokesperson for Karl's Recycling and Pacific Rim, told me his firm gets about $1,000 a ton for the highest-quality stuff like soda bottles, but that half those dollars come from the deposit you pay on the bottle at the store. The other kinds of plastics bring about $25 a ton. Cutler estimated that the cost of collecting and sorting plastic ranges from $1,000 to $3,000 a ton, with the difference made up by the recycling fee on your garbage bill. So you're paying twice for the industry to continue making millions and junking up the planet.
The brokers are reluctant to say where they sell the recovered plastic (proprietary information, you know), but they acknowledge that much of the lower-grade stuff is shipped to Asia.
As part of its Toxic Waste Trade Program, Greenpeace compiled statistics on plastics slipped from U.S. West Coast ports to Asia. In the six-month period between September 1992 and February 1993, Greenpeace found, more than 30,000 tons were exported, some 4,500 tons from Oakland.
Greenpeace sent researcher Ann Leonard to Asia to follow the plastic trail. She found that much of the plastic was simply dumped in landfills there. And at all the so-called recycling facilities she visited, workers sorted through plastic waste without protective gloves, clothing, or masks, and the reprocessing work was done indoors, in hot crowded rooms filled with noxious fumes and no ventilation. Leonard's conclusion: environmental racism.
Jordan's purchasing-policy proposal is aimed at expanding markets for recycled products (no use saving and collecting the stuff if it isn't being bought and used) and at creating local recycling industries. That's great for things like paper and glass, but not for plastic. Oakland should be taking the lead in saying no to a poison industry (including changing its plastic curbside-collection policy) and should not be building the local economy on eco-disasters.
Certainly some existing plastic should be reused where possible and appropriate, like for playground equipment or piers. But we should not confuse this with, or glorify it as, recycling.
When Jordan returns with the proposal early next year, she should drop the plastics section of it. Such technological choices are social decisions that require conscious political movements to push for alternatives. (Remember when we couldn't live without aerosol sprays and Styrofoam?) Otherwise we will be left with whatever poisons make the most money for the industry cartels that control market forces.
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