"I do understand the skepticism, because it hasn't happened in the past, but I think the pressure, the public commitments and, most important, the availability of technology is going to give us a different outcome." "The proof is the dramatic amount of investment that is happening right now," Russell said. In response, industry representative Steve Russell, until recently the vice president of plastics for the trade group the American Chemistry Council, said the industry has never intentionally misled the public about recycling and is committed to ensuring all plastic is recycled. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. "There is serious doubt that can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work - that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled - all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic. NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials.
Garbage truck videos for kids series#
This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline that includes the documentary Plastic Wars, which aired March 31 on PBS. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. "I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage," she says, "and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You're lying. She sends the soda bottles to the state.īut when Leebrick tried to tell people the truth about burying all the other plastic, she says people didn't want to hear it. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. "To me that felt like it was a betrayal of the public trust," she said. None of this plastic will be turned into new plastic things. Laura Leebrick, a manager at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon, is standing on the end of its landfill watching an avalanche of plastic trash pour out of a semitrailer: containers, bags, packaging, strawberry containers, yogurt cups. Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. "They are people that live here, participate in community activities they are as brilliant as in other places, so we just have to make sure that information gets to people.Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon. "I really do think that people here in Park Extension, they can understand how it works like every other borough," said Lavigne Lalonde. Signs reminding people to keep the area clean have gone up around the neighbourhood, and fines have been boosted to $4,000.
Garbage truck videos for kids how to#
Information teams are also being dispatched to knock on doors and educate people on proper waste management, including how to seperate garbage from recycling and compost. On Monday, the borough launched a neighbourhood cleanup "blitz" to get existing garbage pileup under control. "It's not true that if there is a problem here, we're just going to more collection and forget that we are in a climate crisis, and that we have to divert from the landfill," said Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension Mayor Laurence Lavigne Lalonde.
But the borough says now is the time to cut down on waste altogether.