As for the second idea, that plastics are so valuable that we should recycle them, this connection is truly a difficult stretch of intuition. A valuable thing is meant to be kept around for years and eventually sold on eBay to someone who will pay too much in shipping to receive it.
For about a year I’ve been seeing a public service notice on the sides of buses, bus-stops, and billboards that reads “Plastics. Too Valuable to waste. Recycle.” Last weekend in Los Angeles, I saw the next step: a dedicated plastics recycling bin with a familiar message on the side encouraging me to recycle my plastics.
Even when paired with a recycling outpost, the message still struck me as an odd and contradictory message to broadcast: how could something so apparently “valuable” be used as disposable packaging on just about every American consumable item? In fact, the lifecycle of the plastic we see on a daily basis stands as an argument that it’s anything but valuable. Plastic is associated with cheap manufacturing and disposability, not value.
As for the second idea, that plastics are so valuable that we should recycle them, this connection is truly a difficult stretch of intuition. A valuable thing is meant to be kept around for years and eventually sold on eBay to someone who will pay too much in shipping to receive it. A valuable thing is not something we generally recycle (which is really a guilt-free way of throwing something away). The contradiction is revealed by restating it in plain terms: “Plastics are so valuable you should throw them away responsibly.”
Ostensibly offered in the public interest, this ad campaign is a puzzler, but its apparent contradictions are resolved when we learn who dreamed up the message. It turns out that the folks responsible work for the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council, whose primary interest is the promotion of plastics, meaning that as long as plastics continue to be produced, they couldn’t care less about how much of the stuff gets recycled.
To read the website of the American Chemistry Council is to hear the rethinking of plastic as one of the primary building blocks of life, without which modern existence would be entirely unthinkable. Their website cheerily promises to be a place where you may, “Find out more about how American Chemistry is helping you live longer and get more out of life.” Plastics certainly are valuable to the American Chemistry Council, which exists to promote the consumption and continued usage of the stuff in its many forms, so they’d be overjoyed to change the American perception of plastic to be along the same lines as diamonds or luxury cars. They’d be happy with any outcome that increases our reliance on plastic, which is why they focus more on the plastic body parts that help grandpa hold his granddaughter and less on the shopping bags that have combined to create a Texas-sized island in the Pacific Ocean.
Of course, what with all the consumption of plastics and the primacy of the stuff in Wal-Marts and Targets littered across the country, you might think the American Chemistry Council plays an unnecessary role. The problem, and the reason for the PR campaign, is that plastics are increasingly getting a bad rap for being wasteful, permanent, poisonous, and excessively environmentally destructive. Along with our increased negativity about plastic have come calls to stop producing it, to produce less of it, and to consume as little of it as possible. Indeed, there are citizens’ movements, pieces of legislation, and information campaigns working to achieve these goals. Many US states and some cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have outlawed plastic shopping bags and in some areas even Wal-Mart has promised to play along.
In actuality, it makes sense to reduce our consumption of plastic because it lasts forever, and it cannot be disposed of or burned without producing the most toxic chemical combinations we’ve seen, not to mention that it’s strangling sea-life in a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean.
Changing perceptions of this little thought-about component of daily life is probably good news for our environment, but bad news to the American Chemistry Council, so they’ve decided to win us over with a recycling campaign and an ideological argument that links plastic to precious resources such as water. It’s a weird way to get our attention, linked to a feel-good campaign to increase recycling. It’s unlikely to succeed, however, and the sooner we whittle down our reliance on this stuff, the sooner we can be assured it will stop ending up in waterways and oceans, and the sooner we can cease worrying about the dangerous chemicals it’s composed of.
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