Recycling in America has long been controversial and no place more than California, where 'recycling garbage' was a short time ago one of California's top exports.
No one believed China was recycling it but that they said they did was good enough for politicians and elites on the coast, so California claimed they met pollution targets - by continuing to add new items to dump into those blue bins that went into Chinese landfills for the next 300 years.
Like electric car batteries, claiming somethings can be recycled doesn't mean much of it can or will be. Greasy pizza boxes and plastic water bottles are considered recyclable but how naïve must you be to believe it?
Electric car and solar panel naïve, which is a lot, and which is why recycling is such a big business in the state - but is helping the environment even less than wasting $5 billion on mandatory food composting.
I have been saying for years that recycling is a government scam that helps nothing, and plastic is the worst fraud of all. Maybe 5 percent of plastic can be recycled and the cost is nearly as prohibitive as trying to recycle what little can be reused from an electric car battery. Recycling ends up being even worse for the environment than making new products, by far.
The new slam on plastic is that the plastics industry is behind it. Greenwashing is nothing new, Al Gore made $400 million scamming companies and people with carbon credits and planting tree schemes that did nothing for the climate or pollution, so the plastics industry is not some special merchant of doubt for touting that its products are being recycled.
State governments encouraged it. They used taxpayer money to create TV ads to tell people to recycle plastic. Despite their being no scientific legitimacy to recycling plastic any more than there is that existing solar panels are anything but a levy on the poor to make the rich feel better.
Exxon noted 30 years ago that they did not believe recycling was going to improve using government mandates and subsidies - because no product has ever improved using government mandates and subsidies. Exxon applauded the effort but did not believe the results would be worthwhile - unless there became a free-market reason.
No one believed that recycling plastic was going to work without more basic research - so why did California politicians push it off on the people? For the same reason the state has wasted a small fortune on government composting; the appearance of action is more important than people or the environment.
