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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Moreover, materials often lose quality and performance compared
to the original state, resulting in being downcycled into
lower-grade materials that are less durable or have fewer potential
applications. The term downcycling is used to describe a recycled
product, in which the recycled material is of lower quality
and functionality than the original material. In fact, most recycling
ends up being downcycling, in which the process tends
to to increase levels of chemical contamination, by needing to
add more chemicals to the original material in order to make it
useful again 18 and forcing a material into more lifetimes than it
was originally designed for. 19 In their book Cradle to Cradle, the
chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough
convey how recycling and eco-efficiency often tends only to
make the old, destructive system a bit less so, not actually addressing
the main issues but causing a slow and invisible violence
over a longer amount of time.
Finally, materials can oftentimes only be downcycled a limited
number of times before they become unstable. Paper fibres, for
example, become shorter and weaker each time they are recycled
and eventually become unusable for further recycling, ending
up being disposed of in landfill or incineration with the rest
of the unfit materials.
We tend to think of recycling as sorting and separating materials.
Yet “Recycling has not occurred until the loop has closed:
that is, until someone buys (or gets paid to take) the sorted materials,
manufactures them into something else, and sells that
something back to the public.” (Rubbish!, 1992) This means
that for a truly circular system, the output needs to be just as
valuable and useful as the initial material or product – and it is
a whole lot easier when you get to the end, if you’ve thought
about the beginning.
“
The trouble with the circular economy is that you can’t
just design a circular product or service in isolation. The
whole system has to change with it. That circular product
will only go so far if you’ve still got a linear economic system
supporting it.
”
Maxine Perella, Closing the Loop, 2018
33
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