RECYCLING IS A SCAM! How Big Plastic Fooled Us All: a 40+ YEAR SCANDAL

Recycling is like Turducken, but instead of three kinds of meat, it's a scam, stuffed inside of fraud, shoved in a sham and served with a side of deception glazed with tax dollars...

I don’t throw around the word “scam” but when it comes to Plastic “Recycling”, this is some next-level-Enron-sh*t that is going to blow your mind and equally make you livid that you spent all those years peeling labels. I have Carpal tunnel from my mom making my 9-year-old-self soak and scrub off labels in the late 1980s (I'm joking…but for real, those labels were a pain in the… hand.)

HOW RECYCLING BEGAN

(31 second video)

So yeah, the government essentially created the plastic industry during WWII and this is what ultimately led to the birth of Big Plastic. Now keep in mind, Plastics are produced from what? Natural Gas and Crude Oil. Who regulates natural gas? The government. Who owned oil? Rockefeller. [insert DUN, DUN, DUNNNNNNNN! sound effect]

The problem was that, unlike glass, plastic didn’t break, so people were not becoming repeat-plastic customers so, in order for this to be a goldmine, the industry needed people to keep buying more and more and more plastic. What they did was so incredibly diabolical that it will make you wonder how on earth they can ever utter the phrase “climate change”… be sure to send this article to your mother who made you prep the recyclables… (30 second video)

Because the media was telling people to not reuse items and instead throw them in the trash, the plastic waste began quickly building up and people became alarmed. They began rightfully questioning the impacts of this new disposable material on the environment. As usual, concerned citizens couldn’t get legitimate answers from government, so they began protesting. Eventually, this led to 10% of Americans participating in the very first Earth Day in 1970. That’s right, Americans were so outraged over pollution from Big Plastic that they took to the streets to make their voices heard and this really ruffled the feathers of Big Plastic. The industry knew the optics of the huge protests were bad for business, so they were forced to devise a plan…

KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL

They needed people to want to support Big Plastic, so they went on to create a front organization called Keep America Beautiful. This organization was funded by the very beverage and packaging juggernauts pumping out billions of plastic bottles each year, including The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch and more. The purpose of the organization was to shift the blame of plastic pollution from Big Plastic to us. The organization ran PSA ads that made people believe plastic pollution was caused by those terrible people that aren’t properly disposing of their plastic, not the manufacturers.

Here’s their most popular ad, called The Crying Indian that outright accuses us of causing the problem: (1 minute video)

Fun Fact: Just like the ad itself, even the Indian in the ad was fraud. Like Senator Elizabeth Warren, AKA “Pocahontas”, the actor was actually not Indian at all. Not kidding, he was an Italian dude. But the sad Italian-fake-Indian wasn’t enough to totally dupe the public. Even with the teary-eyed Indian, people were still questioning the environmental impacts of throwing out massive amounts of plastic. This meant a far more calculated scheme was required; a scheme that would get the stupid-hippie-tree-huggers and dumb-tinfoil-hat-wearing-conspiracy-theorists to STFU once and for all. Enter:

PLASTIC RECYCLING “RECYCLING”

Studies showed that, for the most part, people are good hearted and they do care about the environment and, when given the opportunity to do good, they usually will. But the environment never meant anything to Big Plastic because all they cared about was their bank accounts so, (you can’t make this sh*t up), they found a way to make people feel good about buying and discarding plastic… I think we can agree, finding a way to make people enjoy throwing something away sounds like no easy task…

1988: The most brilliant, evil plan of all was hatched: This plan was so corrupt yet so genius that, to this day, the average American and pretty much all city and state governments still don’t see it…

They decided to create a symbol that looked so similar to the recycling symbol that people would never realize the difference:

The new symbol was called the “Resin Identification Code”. They then began stamping the Resin Identification Code onto all plastic, leading the public to believe it was recyclable. Here are the seven Resin Identification Codes which are not the same as the recycle symbol:

There is no purpose to the triangle shaped arrows around the number other than deception because code just represents the type of plastic the object is made out of. You see, although it looks nearly identical to the recycle symbol, very little, if any, of these plastics can be even-somewhat recycled. We are going to be discussing what actually happens to these plastics in just a moment. But first…

THE SHOCKING COST TO RECYCLE

In 2020, a journalist wanted to do a follow-up on a dozen amazing recycling projects that Big Plastic and the media heavily publicized starting in 1989. These were projects that demonstrated how fantastic and easy and fun plastic recycling was for communities. These are the projects that ultimately convinced local governments to get on board with the recycling program. To the journalists complete shock, it turned out that all of them quietly closed their doors by the mid-1990s. Yes, 100% shut down within a few years of launching, but only after they used the publicity to sell cities and states on the program.

For example, Mobil (gas station) had a huge Massachusetts recycling facility but it lasted only three years. Amoco had launched a positive-press-worthy project to recycle plastic in New York schools, but it only lasted a mere two years. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in almost 420 parks only made it to seven parks before the company cut funding entirely. They all closed their programs because, not only was there no profit in it, but they were bleeding money by operating them. Despite closing their own doors, they continued to champion the programs to governments, and they even upped the ante by pitching the programs as a money making opportunity that also saves Mother Earth; a real win-win, right? Yet, while recycling was sold to city governments as economically paying its own way and throwing a couple bucks in the city fund, these “Trash for Cash” programs often ended up resulting in the city losing money because the costs to operate the program outweigh the payment received for the recyclables. To top it off, the biggest creators of the plastic waste were the same exact companies pushing the agenda from the start!

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The loss had become so bad that, by 1997, some cities were already losing nearly $100 for every ton recycled (or, instead of saying “some cities were losing”, I should I say, “tax payers were having their money pissed away to the tune of $100 per ton recycled.”). But losing money over a fake recycle symbol engraved on the bottom of a plastic container isn’t even the worst of it, believe it or not. This brings us to:

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS TO “RECYCABLES”?

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"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," said Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association.

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Did you know that, since first mass-produced in the mid-1900s, only 9 percent of all plastics made have actually ever been recycled? 9%! At one point, the manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon tried to blow the whistle on what is ACTUALLY happening to plastic at her facility. She even went to the City Counsel to inform them of the outright fraud, but they didn’t want to hear it. Reality is, it is very difficult for anyone to comprehend just how deep this scam goes. Confronting the lie means accepting that, for over 30 YEARS we have all been duped, big time. At this point, this lie is too big for governments to admit and for citizens to come to terms with.

AFTER THE RECYCLING CENTER…

Plastic Pollution Coalition did a phenomenal writeup on what really happens after the recycling center. Here’s some of their research:

Plastic “Recycling” Gets Shipped Away

Garbage is traded under the pretext of recycling. An enormous amount of plastics, labeled as “recycling,” have been historically shipped from the Global North to the Global South. In 2018, 157,000 Shipping Containers of U.S. Plastic Waste were Exported to Countries with Poor Waste Management. Shipped plastic waste is rarely ever recycled upon reaching its destination. The executive director of the New Haven Solid Waste and Recycling Authority agreed: “Ninety percent of our stuff was going over to China. They were taking all of our plastics, cardboard, paper, you name it. We were in essence shipping them our garbage." - Yep, we fill their land with our plastic trash so we can keep the Recycling lie going and in return they sell us poisons, disguised as vitamins, medicines and food to kill us. It’s a toxic relationship, quite literally.

Plastic “Recycling” Gets Burned

Check out this insane video! These people went undercover and secretly GPS tracked “Recycling” Companies! (2 minute video)

An ever-growing amount of plastics are sent to incinerators, sometimes called “waste-to-energy” plants. These facilities burn plastics in huge ovens that release toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases, while producing only meager amounts of electricity. Incineration also produces a constant stream of toxic ash that is hazardously stored in manmade ponds or is landfilled. If you read my previous posts about byproducts, you already know Big Corporations will do anything to avoid paying disposal fees, even if that means offloading it in consumable products, dumping it in the water supply for our health, or reselling it as “waste-to-energy”, all along knowing the damages far outweigh the supposed benefits.

Landfills

Other plastics collected as recycling are simply landfilled. They go straight from the recycling center to the trash center.

DOES THE EPA KNOW?

Although recycling plastic is still heavily pushed on us, often by the government, the government is well aware that it isn’t being recycled. Here’s a 2018 post on EPA.gov that shows that under 10% is actually being recycled; the vast majority goes to the landfill:

If you want to watch a fantastic 17-minute, pretty entertaining video on this topic, here you go:

And that, my friends, is exactly how we got duped. The ironic part of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle was that, all along, the solution was simply to reuse, which is exactly what we were doing pre-Big Plastic.

Like the effort I put into this? Buy me a coffee, not in a recyclable plastic cup:

NEXT READ:

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Sources:

https://nextcity.org/features/cost-of-recycling-america-extended-producer-responsibility-cities

https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2022/5/16/what-really-happens-to-your-plastic-recycling#:~:text=Plastic%20%E2%80%9CRecycling%E2%80%9D%20Ends%20Up%20in,%2Ddumped%20(often%20illegally).

https://nextcity.org/features/cost-of-recycling-america-extended-producer-responsibility-cities

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

https://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/blog/2020/4/7/why-is-the-us-still-offshoring-post-consumer-plastic-waste-around-the-world

U.S. Plastic Waste Exports (U.S. Census Bureau data)

Country Waste Mismanagement Rates (Jambeck et. al, 2015). In this assessment, high waste mismanagement rates are considered 5% and larger.