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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Currently, efforts to reduce waste are often directed towards
stakeholders that provide waste treatment and disposal instead
of those that generate the waste in the first place.
One crucial step towards sustainability would be to better
address the problems that occur in the early stages of the
system and shift the responsibility from government entities
to producers and make the actual polluter accountable. A
concept termed extended producer responsibility (EPR) was
first formally introduced in Sweden by Thomas Lindhqvist
in 1990 and defined as “an environmental protection strategy
to reach an environmental objective of a decreased total
environmental impact of a product, by making the manufacturer
of the product responsible for the entire life-cycle of
the product and especially for the take-back, recycling and
final disposal.” 60 It is suggested that enforcing recycling
rates, bans and taxation often fails to adequate reduce pollution,
and financial incentives need to be implemented to encourage
manufacturers to design with higher environmental
standards and reducing toxicity and waste. 60
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