It could be argued that the U.S. environmental movement started with recycling. For old-school environmentalists, recycling is such an integral part of the movement that it’s difficult to separate the two. And in those early days, back in the 1980s, the cause was noble and pure: Why throw away products that could be new again? Why not turn trash into raw materials?
At a certain point, though, recycling developed something of a dark side from an environmental perspective. On the surface, it’s still a good idea both to recycle waste and to design products and packaging with the idea of recycling them in a closed loop. Unfortunately, in its modern-day incarnation, recycling has also given the manufacturers of disposable items a way to essentially market overconsumption as environmentalism. Every year, reports come out touting rising recycling rates and neglecting to mention the soaring consumption that goes along with them. American consumers assuage any guilt they might feel about consuming mass quantities of unnecessary, disposable goods by dutifully tossing those items into their recycling bins and hauling them out to the curb each week.
Trade groups representing various packaging interests–plastic, paper, glass–have become the largest proponents and financial sponsors of recycling. If you go to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website looking for statistics on packaging recycling, the stats on plastics recycling come from the American Plastics Council and the Society of the Plastics Industries, Inc. (SPI), both trade associations representing the plastics industry.
Source: Forbes
By Amy Westervelt