THREAD: this article by @LauraSullivaNPR is so good that I just need to tweet an entire thread of quotes. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled

"But it's [plastic is] not valuable, and it never has been. And what's more, the makers of plastic — the nation's largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite."

"'There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis,' one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because...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 Society of the Plastics Industry...one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR."

"Documents show industry officials knew this reality about recycling plastic as far back as the 1970s...Recycling plastic, it [a document] told the executives, was unlikely to happen on a broad scale. 'There is no recovery from obsolete products,' it says."

"Thomas took over back in the late 1980s, and back then, plastic was in a crisis. There was too much plastic trash. The public was getting upset...So began the plastics industry's $50 million-a-year ad campaign promoting the benefits of plastic."

"At the same time, the industry launched a number of feel-good projects, telling the public to recycle plastic...NPR tracked down almost a dozen projects the industry publicized starting in 1989. All of them shuttered or failed by the mid-1990s."

"None of them was able to get past the economics: 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."

"Industry documents from this time show that just a couple of years earlier, starting in 1989, oil and plastics executives began a quiet campaign to lobby almost 40 states to mandate that the symbol appear on all plastic — even if there was no way to economically recycle it."

"Fix recycling is the industry's message too, says Steve Russell, the industry's recent spokesman....Russell says this time will be different....But plastic today is harder to sort than ever..."

"He [retired plastic industry exec] 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 possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition." /fin - now go read the entire excellent & terrifying article