Recycling is a Lie. Plastic Manufacturers Spent $1B to Make You Think It’s Working

Recycling campaigns are designed to sell more plastic

“If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they're not going to be as concerned about the environment.” (Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry / Image by author)

In 1977, residents of New Zealand discovered plastic littering their beaches. In response to the growing crisis, policymakers began discussing how to reduce the public’s growing dependence on plastic.

Fearing new legislation might be detrimental to their industry, plastics manufacturers launched a new campaign to desensitize the public to plastic waste. It was called recycling.

The idea behind recycling was simple. Consumers feel bad tossing a bottle in the garbage when they hear these same bottles are killing marine life. But if people are told to sort their trash, they’ll stop blaming plastics for polluting our oceans — because those products would have magically disappeared if only they had been properly recycled.

Still, executives feared this plan might backfire and reduce demand for virgin plastics. These concerns were alleviated when a (leaked) internal memo concluded “there is serious doubt that [recycled plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis.”

Whenever policymakers threatened to regulate plastic, manufacturers lobbied to redirect efforts toward making recycling more feasible. This fake solution proved an invaluable tool for distracting everyone away from the real problem.

In 2020, Larry Thomas resigned as president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, the largest plastics lobbying group in the United States. The push to recycle had worked — even after Thomas came clean about his organization’s deception, recycling was so ingrained into our collective consciousness that many refused to blame manufacturers for the growing environmental crisis. After all, the real culprits are lazy consumers who refuse to sort their trash.

“The feeling was the plastics industry was under fire, we got to do what it takes to take the heat off, because we want to continue to make plastic products… If the public thinks the recycling is working, then they’re not going to be as concerned about the environment.”

– Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry