“What’s in the Air” is a column by Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force Co-Founder and Director, in which she explores life today through the lens of air quality and public health. The list of recommendations below was cowritten with Cynthia Palmer, Moms’ Senior Petrochemicals Analyst.
Many of us were raised on the mantra of recycling our plastics. We’ve been bombarded—for decades—with marketing from the plastics industry telling us that plastic trash is recyclable and that it is our civic duty to place it in the blue bin. Turns out this is not true, and we have a plastics crisis, from one end of the chain—making it—to the other—tossing it.
But don’t take our word for it. Watch these investigative videos, read these documents, and decide for yourself. For my part, I’m throwing plastic waste into my trash because right now it is safer for all of us to put it in landfills. And of course, I’m cutting as much plastic out of my life as I possibly can. But wow. That’s hard. That’s why we are fighting for big system-wide changes.
TELL CONGRESS: PROTECT OUR FAMILIES FROM PLASTIC INCINERATION POLLUTION
Here’s a list of what we would recommend you watch or read.
- This CBS Sunday Morning segment, Critics Call Out Plastics Industry Over Recycling ‘Fraud,’ unpacks a recent report accusing the plastics industry of misleading the public about the viability of recycling for decades.
- This PBS Frontline documentary, Plastic Wars, describes how the plastics industry engineered the false expectation that recycling could solve the plastics crisis.
- The ABC News investigation, Trashed: The Secret Life of Plastic Recycling, documents the fate of dozens of electronic trackers hidden in plastic items collected for recycling.
- This video from the Story of Stuff Project, The Story of Plastics: Where Your Recycled Plastic Ends Up, describes what happens to plastic recycling you toss it in the bin.
- In this CBC News Marketplace report, Tracking Your Plastic: Exposing Recycling Myths, Canadian reporters go undercover in Malaysia, posing as recycling brokers, to expose the lucrative plastic recycling business.
- This Off the Grid documentary, Malaysia’s Plastic Jungle, investigates the consequences of illegal foreign plastic waste recycling in Malaysia.
- This Bloomberg exposé, The Warehouses of Plastic Behind TerraCycle’s Recycling Dream, shows how researchers used metal tags to trace where the plastic trash sent to TerraCycle, a company that claims to “recycle the unrecyclable,” actually ended up.
- In this Inside Climate News investigation, Dumped, Not Recycled?, researchers used Apple AirTag devices to reveal that the ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell Houston Recycling Collaboration has been secretly sending plastic waste to a giant garbage pile—misleading the public about recycling while creating a fire hazard in Houston’s summer heat.
- This Grist report, Companies Are Claiming to Be ‘Plastic Neutral.’ Is It Greenwashing?, unpacks plastic credit and offset schemes that rely on faraway garbage collection and recycling initiatives in order to claim products are plastic-neutral or net-zero-plastic.
TELL CONGRESS: PROTECT OUR FAMILIES FROM PLASTIC INCINERATION POLLUTION