Toxic Legacies / Filtering the Truth
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices. My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
The concept of recycling has gained immense popularity as a sustainable approach to waste pollution and is embraced as a potential solution to our escalating environmental crisis. However, not all recycling practices – especially when it comes to plastic – are necessarily environmentally friendly. In many cases, claims to recyclability are merely greenwashing, a marketing strategy used by companies to position themselves as environ- mentally conscious without implementing actual changes in their production practices.
My master project aims to investigate the greenwashing behind recycling and how the concept of recycling can tend to justify the production of waste in a consumer-based system.
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Though the extensive filter research and development
efforts in the 1950s suggest a phase of genuine optimism
among cigarette companies towards the reduction
of the health hazards, 4 by the 1960s cigarette companies
discovered what a study in the journal Tobacco
Control termed the ‘filter problem’: the impossibility of
creating a filter that reduced the harms imposed by
smoking to a measurable amount whilst simultaneously
providing the smoker with the same ‘satisfaction’ they
were used to. This realisation led to a transition away
from reducing hazards and towards using the filter as a
marketing tool designed to continue to keep and recruit
consumers. 5 Invented in 1953 by R. J. Reynolds’ chemist
Claude Teague, 6 additional chemicals were added to the
filter, allowing the colour of the filter to become darker
when exposed to smoke – giving the impression they
were filtering out harmful particles and contributing to
the illusion of the filtration being more effective than it
actually is. 7 In fact, recent studies even suggest the filter
to be an additional health risk to the smoker. 8
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