Recycle Scam

In our quest towards a greener and more sustainable future we tend to concentrate on fossil fuel and reducing carbon emissions to combat the greenhouse effect. This is all well and good, but it's not enough. To establish the significant course-correction we need, we'll have to look at the way our economy works. Today I'll discuss the recycle scam to illustrate.

A couple of days ago I discussed the way we're all being made personally responsible for climate change by popularizing the term Carbon Footprint. This is but one of many massive PR campaigns to shift blame from the giant companies that are really responsible for carbon emissions. In that post I neglected to mention the military in general, and the U.S. military in particular, as it is the world's largest and best equipped military by far, as one of the main culprits:

In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University found the US military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries”. It established that if the US military were a nation state, it would be the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world. These figures were from taking into account the emissions from fuel usage alone.
_{source: Earth.org}

It should be no secret that the U.S. military has been the enforcer of the world economic status quo for decades, at least since the end of the Second World War. It has been deployed against countries aspiring to implement a different political and economic ideology, and countries that refuse to become part of the world monetary system with the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency. If you're still a believer in the PR message that the U.S. military goes around the world to "spread freedom and democracy," I really don't know what to say.

Polluting the planet is a feature, and not a bug, of capitalism. If you're a regular visitor of my blog, or if you have a basic understanding of how capitalism works, you already know about how planned obsolescence is used to boost sales. We deliberately make products that don't last, that need to be replaced regularly, just to grow profits and to grow the economy. Growth without which capitalism would collapse. And here's where the recycle scam enters the ugly picture. Recycling plastic in particular.

You see, os all the things we've invented, plastic is the most durable stuff on the planet. Since the 1930s toothbrushes are made from plastic, and every single one of them is probably still around somewhere on the planet:

Plastic has so fully infiltrated toothbrush design that it’s nearly impossible to clean our teeth without touching a polymer. And because plastic is essentially indestructible, that means nearly every single toothbrush made since the 1930s is still out there in the world somewhere, living on as a piece of trash.
_{source: National Geographic}

The above linked article is titled How your toothbrush became a part of the plastic crisis. Isn't it ironic how the most durable material made by men has become one of humankind's biggest environmental crises? A lot of the plastic products we use every day can simply be reused, like the billions upon billions of water bottles. But we don't. We're encouraged not to. We can even make plastic that's relatively easy to recycle. But we don't. And the reason why we don't is the same as always: it's the economy, stupid!

Recycling plastic is a very expensive process, a lot more expensive than to just produce more new plastic. And this is how the recycling of plastic has become one of the biggest scams in history. Every now and then, the world's biggest plastic producers start a massive PR campaign with commercials telling us to take personal responsibility (there it is again) to separate our garbage so that different materials end up in the right place to be recycled. You know the deal: one garbage can for paper, one for biodegradable materials, one for glass and... one for plastic. Most of the plastic isn't recycled though.

We all know the Universal Recycling Symbol; it's the three thick arrows chasing each other around a triangle. The plastic industry has devised its own system of recycling "grades" ranging from 1 to 7, with each grade representing a different type of plastic and different products it can be re-used for. However, that number or grade, which is printed on plastic products for consumers to see, is placed in the center of their own variation on the universal recycling logo. It's not the "official" logo, but three thin arrows chasing each other around a triangle. I suspect they don't use the official logo because in practice most of the plastics aren't recycled at all.

The main message to get out of all this is that durability, recycling and reusing are all antithetical to capitalism's main drive for profits and growth. Every PR campaign that goes against this is a scam, just a pretty picture of good intentions that ultimately means nothing and is geared towards making us, the consumers, feel guilty about what's happening to the planet. Please watch the below linked video, it's not that long and has a lot of valuable information on the history and dishonesty of the plastic industry.

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