Did "Big Oil" Sell Us on a Recycling Scam?

Summary

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. “Reduce, reuse, recycle”: these three words have become as ubiquitous as the plastic waste they attempt to combat. Once seen as a simple roadmap toward sustainability, this mantra now conceals a far more complex and troubling reality. While these principles serve as a starting point for environmental action, they also have a deceptive history rooted in the petrochemical industry’s effort to avoid accountability. The truth is, no matter how diligently we sort our waste products, individual actions alone cannot solve the growing crisis of plastic pollution. The ubiquity of plastic in modern life makes recycling seem like a moral imperative. From straws and bags to take-out containers, single-use plastics crowd landfills and clog waterways. And the crisis is accelerating. Legal scholar Roberta Mann warns that by 2050, plastic in the ocean could outweigh fish. The United States led the world in plastic waste in 2016, Mann writes, generating over 42 million metric tons. The COVID-19 pandemic further fueled plastics consumption, with a spike in single-use personal protective equipment and packaging from online shopping. But here’s the catch: research suggests that our dependence on recycling as a solution isn’t only ineffective—it’s based on a carefully crafted illusion. The narrative that recycling can meaningfully counteract the plastic crisis was constructed by the oil and gas industry to maintain public demand for plastic and delay regulation of its production. As an investigation conducted by NPR and PBS Frontline unearthed in 2020 and reported in a Frontline episode called “Plastic Wars,” oil companies have known for decades about the inability to recycle plastics throughout the US. Tracing the history of the issue, the Center for International Law outlines how in the 1950s and ’60s the fossil fuel, petrochemical, and packaging industries began convening on the issue of plastic pollution as reports emer...