How To Invest 35000 Dollars

Landfill workers coffin all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide explanation

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Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon.

Laura Sullivan/NPR

Notation: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. Listen to the episode here.

Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is continuing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups.

None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. All of it is cached.

"To me that felt similar it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. "I had been lying to people ... unwittingly."

Rogue, similar most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, simply when People's republic of china shut its doors ii years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. She sends the soda bottles to the state.

But when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't desire to hear it.

"I think the outset meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more than to recycle than information technology was to dispose of the same cloth every bit garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: Yous're lying. This is gold. We take the fourth dimension to clean it, take the labels off, separate information technology and put information technology hither. It's golden. This is valuable."

But it's not valuable, and information technology never has been. And what'south more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, fifty-fifty as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the contrary.

This story is role of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline that includes the documentary Plastic Wars, which aired March 31 on PBS. Picket it online now.

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months earthworks into internal industry documents and interviewing top sometime officials. We found that the manufacture sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't piece of work — that the bulk of plastic could be, and would exist, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

The industry'southward sensation that recycling wouldn't go on plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the programme's earliest days, nosotros found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can e'er be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech.

Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, considering, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.

"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Guild of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Clan and one of the industry's most powerful merchandise groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.

In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Quango, said the manufacture has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled.

"The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right at present," Russell said. "I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I call up the pressure, the public commitments and, most of import, the availability of applied science is going to give us a different outcome."

Hither's the basic problem: All used plastic tin can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting information technology down is expensive. Plastic too degrades each time it is reused, pregnant information technology tin't be reused more than one time or twice.

On the other mitt, new plastic is cheap. It'south made from oil and gas, and it's well-nigh always less expensive and of meliorate quality to just start fresh.

All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known niggling about these difficulties.

Information technology could be because that'due south not what they were told.

Starting in the 1990s, the public saw an increasing number of commercials and messaging most recycling plastic.

"The bottle may look empty, yet it'south anything simply trash," says i ad from 1990 showing a plastic bottle bouncing out of a garbage truck. "It's full of potential. ... We've pioneered the land'south largest, nearly comprehensive plastic recycling program to help plastic fill valuable uses and roles."

These commercials carried a distinct message: Plastic is special, and the consumer should recycle it.

It may have sounded like an environmentalist's bulletin, only the ads were paid for by the plastics manufacture, made up of companies similar Exxon, Chevron, Dow, DuPont and their lobbying and merchandise organizations in Washington.

Industry companies spent tens of millions of dollars on these ads and ran them for years, promoting the benefits of a product that, for the almost part, was buried, was burned or, in some cases, wound up in the ocean.

Documents show industry officials knew this reality near recycling plastic every bit far dorsum every bit the 1970s.

Many of the manufacture's old documents are housed in libraries, such as the one on the grounds of the commencement DuPont family home in Delaware. Others are with universities, where former industry leaders sent their records.

At Syracuse University, there are boxes of files from a former industry consultant. And inside one of them is a report written in April 1973 by scientists tasked with forecasting possible issues for acme industry executives.

Recycling plastic, it told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale.

"There is no recovery from obsolete products," it says.

It says pointedly: Plastic degrades with each turnover.

"A deposition of resin backdrop and performance occurs during the initial fabrication, through crumbling, and in whatsoever reclamation procedure," the written report told executives.

Recycling plastic is "costly," it says, and sorting information technology, the report concludes, is "infeasible."

And at that place are more documents, echoing decades of this knowledge, including one analysis from a summit official at the industry'southward most powerful merchandise group. "The costs of separating plastics ... are high," he tells colleagues, before noting that the price of using oil to brand plastic is so low that recycling plastic waste "tin't yet be justified economically."

Larry Thomas, the erstwhile president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, worked side past side with elevation oil and plastics executives.

He'due south retired now, on the coast of Florida where he likes to bike, and feels conflicted about the fourth dimension he worked with the plastics industry.

"I did what the industry wanted me to practise, that's for sure," he says. "But my personal views didn't ever jibe with the views I had to take every bit part of my task."

Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. In that location was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset.

Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon, where newspaper and metals even so take markets only about plastic is thrown away. All plastic must first become through a recycling facility like this one, just only a fraction of the plastic produced really winds up getting recycled. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

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Laura Sullivan/NPR

Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon, where paper and metals yet take markets merely most plastic is thrown away. All plastic must starting time get through a recycling facility like this ane, but but a fraction of the plastic produced really winds upwards getting recycled.

Laura Sullivan/NPR

In ane document from 1989, Thomas calls executives at Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, DuPont, Procter & Gamble and others to a private meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington.

"The image of plastics is deteriorating at an alarming rate," he wrote. "We are budgeted a point of no return."

He told the executives they needed to act.

The "viability of the manufacture and the profitability of your visitor" are at stake.

Thomas remembers at present.

"The feeling was the plastics industry was nether fire — nosotros got to practice what it takes to accept the heat off, considering we desire to continue to make plastic products," he says.

At this time, Thomas had a co-worker named Lew Freeman. He was a vice president of the lobbying group. He remembers many of the meetings like the one in Washington.

"The basic question on the tabular array was, You guys as our trade association in the plastics industry aren't doing enough — we need to do more," Freeman says. "I recollect this is i of those exchanges that sticks with me 35 years afterwards or however long it'south been ... and it was what we need to do is ... annunciate our way out of it. That was the idea thrown out."

And so began the plastics manufacture'due south $50 million-a-twelvemonth ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic.

"Presenting the possibilities of plastic!" one iconic ad blared, showing kids in bicycle helmets and plastic bags floating in the air.

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"This advertising was motivated offset and foremost past legislation and other initiatives that were beingness introduced in country legislatures and sometimes in Congress," Freeman says, "to ban or adjourn the use of plastics because of its operation in the waste stream."

At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-skillful projects, telling the public to recycle plastic. Information technology funded sorting machines, recycling centers, nonprofits, even expensive benches outside grocery stores made out of plastic bags.

Few of these projects actually turned much plastic into new things.

NPR tracked downwardly almost a dozen projects the manufacture publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed past the mid-1990s. Mobil's Massachusetts recycling facility lasted three years, for case. Amoco's projection to recycle plastic in New York schools lasted two. Dow and Huntsman's highly publicized plan to recycle plastic in national parks fabricated information technology to seven out of 419 parks earlier the companies cut funding.

None of them was able to get by the economic science: Making new plastic out of oil is cheaper and easier than making it out of plastic trash.

Both Freeman and Thomas, the head of the lobbying group, say the executives all knew that.

"There was a lot of discussion about how difficult information technology was to recycle," Thomas remembers. "They knew that the infrastructure wasn't at that place to really accept recycling amount to a whole lot."

Even as the ads played and the projects got underway, Thomas and Freeman say industry officials wanted to get recycling plastic into people'south homes and exterior on their curbs with blueish bins.

The industry created a special group called the Quango for Solid Waste Solutions and brought a human from DuPont, Ron Liesemer, over to run it.

Liesemer's task was to at to the lowest degree effort to make recycling work — because there was some hope, he said, however unlikely, that maybe if they could get recycling started, somehow the economics of it all would work itself out.

"I had no staff, merely I had money," Liesemer says. "Millions of dollars."

Liesemer took those millions out to Minnesota and other places to starting time local plastic recycling programs.

Simply then he ran into the same problem all the industry documents found. Recycling plastic wasn't making economic sense: There were besides many dissimilar kinds of plastic, hundreds of them, and they can't be melted downwardly together. They have to be sorted out.

"Aye, it can exist done," Liesemer says, "simply who's going to pay for it? Because information technology goes into as well many applications, information technology goes into likewise many structures that simply would non be practical to recycle."

Liesemer says he started every bit many programs equally he could and hoped for the best.

"They were trying to go along their products on the shelves," Liesemer says. "That's what they were focused on. They weren't thinking what lesson should nosotros learn for the next 20 years. No. Solve today'southward problem."

And Thomas, who led the trade group, says all of these efforts started to have an effect: The message that plastic could be recycled was sinking in.

"I can only say that afterwards a while, the temper seemed to change," he says. "I don't know whether it was because people thought recycling had solved the problem or whether they were and then in love with plastic products that they were willing to overlook the ecology concerns that were mounting up."

But as the industry pushed those public strategies to get by the crunch, officials were also quietly launching a broader plan.

In the early 1990s, at a small recycling facility near San Diego, a man named Coy Smith was one of the first to run into the industry'southward new initiative.

Back and so, Smith ran a recycling business. His customers were watching the ads and wanted to recycle plastic. And so Smith immune people to put ii plastic items in their bins: soda bottles and milk jugs. He lost money on them, he says, but the aluminum, paper and steel from his regular business concern helped offset the costs.

Simply so, one day, well-nigh overnight, his customers started putting all kinds of plastic in their bins.

"The symbols start showing up on the containers," he explains.

Smith went out to the piles of plastic and started flipping over the containers. All of them were now stamped with the triangle of arrows — known as the international recycling symbol — with a number in the heart. He knew right away what was happening.

"All of a sudden, the consumer is looking at what's on their soda canteen and they're looking at what'southward on their yogurt tub, and they say, 'Oh well, they both accept a symbol. Oh well, I guess they both get in,' " he says.

Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

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Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon.

Laura Sullivan/NPR

The bins were now total of trash he couldn't sell. He called colleagues at recycling facilities all across the country. They reported having the same trouble.

Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet entrada to vestibule almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no manner to economically recycle information technology. Some environmentalists also supported the symbol, thinking information technology would help split up plastic.

Smith said what it did was make all plastic wait recyclable.

"The consumers were dislocated," Smith says. "It totally undermined our credibility, undermined what nosotros knew was the truth in our community, not the truth from a lobbying group out of D.C."

But the lobbying group in D.C. knew the truth in Smith's community too. A report given to top officials at the Lodge of the Plastics Industry in 1993 told them about the issues.

"The code is being misused," information technology says bluntly. "Companies are using information technology as a 'green' marketing tool."

The lawmaking is creating "unrealistic expectations" about how much plastic can really be recycled, it told them.

Smith and his colleagues launched a national protest, started a working group and fought the industry for years to get the symbol removed or changed. They lost.

"Nosotros don't accept manpower to compete with this," Smith says. "We just don't. Even though nosotros were all defended, it even so was like, tin nosotros proceed fighting a battle like this on and on and on from this massive manufacture that clearly has no finish in sight of what they're able to do and willing to practice to continue their image the image they desire."

"Information technology's pure manipulation of the consumer," he says.

In response, manufacture officials told NPR that the code was merely e'er meant to help recycling facilities sort plastic and was not intended to create any confusion.

Without question, plastic has been critical to the state's success. It'southward cheap and durable, and it'southward a chemic curiosity.

It's also hugely profitable. The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.

And if there was a sign of this future, information technology's a brand-new chemical plant that rises from the apartment skyline outside Sweeny, Texas. Information technology'south so new that information technology's still shiny, and inside the facility, the concrete is gratis from stains.

Chevron Phillips Chemical's new $6 billion plastic manufacturing plant rises from the skyline in Sweeny, Texas. Company officials say they encounter a bright futurity for their products as demand for plastic continues to rise. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

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Laura Sullivan/NPR

This plant is Chevron Phillips Chemical's $6 billion investment in new plastic.

"We see a very bright hereafter for our products," says Jim Becker, the vice president of sustainability for Chevron Phillips, inside a pristine new warehouse next to the institute.

"These are products the globe needs and continues to demand," he says. "We're very optimistic almost future growth."

With that growth, though, comes ever more plastic trash. But Becker says Chevron Phillips has a plan: It will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes by 2040.

Becker seems earnest. He tells a story about vacationing with his married woman and being devastated past the plastic trash they saw. When asked how Chevron Phillips will recycle 100% of the plastic it makes, he doesn't hesitate.

"Recycling has to get more efficient, more economic," he says. "We've got to exercise a better chore, collecting the waste matter, sorting information technology. That's going to exist a huge try."

Fix recycling is the manufacture's message likewise, says Steve Russell, the industry's contempo spokesman.

"Fixing recycling is an imperative, and nosotros've got to get it right," he says. "I empathize there is dubiety and cynicism. That's going to exist. But bank check back in. We're there."

Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the get-go plastic crunch by getting people to believe something the industry knew and so wasn't true: That most plastic could be and would exist recycled.

Russell says this fourth dimension will be dissimilar.

"It didn't become recycled because the arrangement wasn't upwards to par," he says. "Nosotros hadn't invested in the ability to sort information technology and there hadn't been market signals that companies were willing to buy it, and both of those things exist today."

But plastic today is harder to sort than e'er: In that location are more kinds of plastic, information technology's cheaper to brand plastic out of oil than plastic trash and there is exponentially more of information technology than thirty years ago.

And during those 30 years, oil and plastic companies made billions of dollars in profit as the public consumed ever more quantities of plastic.

Russell doesn't dispute that.

"And during that time, our members have invested in developing the technologies that take brought us where we are today," he says. "We are going to be able to brand all of our new plastic out of existing municipal solid waste in plastic."

Recently, an industry advancement group funded by the nation'south largest oil and plastic companies launched its most expensive effort yet to promote recycling and cleanup of plastic waste product. There's fifty-fifty a new ad.

New plastic bottles come off the line at a plastic manufacturing facility in Maryland. Plastic production is expected to triple past 2050. Laura Sullivan/NPR hide caption

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New plastic bottles come off the line at a plastic manufacturing facility in Maryland. Plastic product is expected to triple past 2050.

Laura Sullivan/NPR

"We take the people that tin modify the globe," it says to soaring music as people pick upwards plastic trash and as bottles go sorted in a recycling center.

Freeman, the one-time industry official, recently watched the ad.

"Déjà vu all over again," he says as the ad finishes. "This is the same kind of thinking that ran in the '90s. I don't recollect this kind of advertising is, is helpful at all."

Larry Thomas said the same.

"I don't think annihilation has changed," Thomas says. "Sounds exactly the same."

These days as Thomas bikes down by the beach, he says he spends a lot of fourth dimension thinking about the oceans and what volition happen to them in 20 or 50 years, long later he is gone.

And as he thinks back to those years he spent in conference rooms with peak executives from oil and plastic companies, what occurs to him now is something he says maybe should take been obvious all along.

He says what he saw was an industry that didn't want recycling to work. Because if the job is to sell as much oil as you maybe can, any corporeality of recycled plastic is competition.

"You know, they were not interested in putting any real coin or effort into recycling considering they wanted to sell virgin material," Thomas says. "Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come up forth that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin textile — that'due south their concern."

And they are. Analysts now wait plastic production to triple past 2050.

Cat Schuknecht contributed to this report.

How To Invest 35000 Dollars,

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

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