Plastic Recycling Is A Gigantic Fraud

By FRANK LINGO

Let’s face the facts: plastic recycling is a fraud and always has been. nnAmericans are the world’s worst plastic producers with about an annual 486 pounds per person, according to a May 1, 2023 article in Inside Climate News by James Bruggers. That’s over a pound every day for each of us buggers.

Sure, some of us try to recycle it. Fat lot of good it does. We used to ship it off to China on humongous freighters where they supposedly made it into new plastic products. They didn’t. China either burned it, releasing toxic chemicals into the air, or they dumped it in dumps. Oh, excuse me, I mean landfills. Doesn’t that sound nicer?

All those little symbols on our milk, mustard, yogurt, detergent and juice jugs are just delusional decoration because the plastic goes into our ecosystem, one way or another.

Those recycling symbols come from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which provides Green Guides to establish guidelines for companies’ claims regarding their green behavior. The FTC is now in process of re-evaluating the guides, as it has been a decade since the last revision.

Plastic purveyors are pushing for approval of their unproven methods of high-heat processing in chemical plants. Environmental advocates say the companies are trying to greenwash their public image and that the new plants will only incinerate the plastic, with a pittance of product to show for it.

Should we consider this a crisis, and how bad is it? A New York Times opinion essay from April 23, 2023 by Mark O’Connell led this way: “There is plastic in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and in our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink, and the food we eat, and even in the air we breathe.”

Research is scant on the effects this is having on our species but if anyone thinks it can be anything but bad for humans and all animals, they should see Mr. Trump because he has a bridge in Brooklyn to sell them.

Microplastics and the even tinier nanoplastics pervade the planet. They are found in fish deep in the sea and in eagles high in the mountains. There is a floating island we’ve inadvertently created called the Pacific Plastic Patch that is twice the size of Texas.

Even if our focus is strictly on ourselves, we’re acting crazy. The harm we’ve done to the Earth has come back to bite us in the blood. The very least we can do is prohibit these products and switch our containers to glass, paper and plant-based plastic substitutes from the likes of hemp and jute, which are already available and are biodegradable.

The alternative to adopting innovation is keep on polluting the planet with plastic. That is like all of us lining up to jump off that bridge in Brooklyn.

Frank Lingo is a free-lance writer based in Lawrence, Kan. Email: lingofrank@gmail.com. Check Lingo’s website: www.greenbeat.world

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2023

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