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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“
It’s pretty amazing that our society has reached a
point where the effort necessary to extract oil from
the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic,
shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, but it, and
bring it home is considered to be less effort that
what it takes to just wash the spoon when you’re
done with it.
” N.A.
Studies suggesting plastic waste to be a missed economic opportunity,
actually saving energy compared to the production of
the virgin material 17 and estimating $8.3 billion dollars of plastic
waste being lost to the commodity market in the US alone 23 –
pose the question at what cost. Plastic as a material with all its
chemicals has been known to create both environmental and
public health problems, 24 and so does its recycling. The question
is really what to incorporate into the cost calculation and
what not, because including these secondary consequences as
an additional cost, would definitely change the calculated outcome.
Recycling can be one of the answers to avoid waste buildup and
decrease the dependence on finite resources. However for this
to effectively happen, the cost of recycling either has to come
down, the calculations have to be more comprehensive, and the
price of a raw recycled plastic has to go up to generate more
money than it costs.
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