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From HEATED
Summary
- The plastic industry is spending millions on advertising advanced recycling as a solution to plastic pollution, but investigations have found that it rarely produces new plastic and may even be worse for the environment than regular recycling.
- Despite the industry’s claims, advanced recycling plants are not widely operational, and the main products they produce are oil and chemicals, not recycled plastic.
- The fossil fuel and chemical industries are backing advanced recycling, which is seen as a “toxic, climate-damaging, and ineffective” process that disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities.
- The industry has known for decades that advanced recycling is not a viable solution, yet continues to push for it through misleading advertising and lobbying efforts.
The plastic industry is spending millions advertising a new way to recycle. It doesn’t work. Source: The American Chemistry Council
If you’ve tuned into any major TV network in the last few months, you may have seen an ad promising a brand new way to end plastic pollution: advanced recycling.
As pastel plastic products fall like dominoes, the ad asks you to “imagine a future where plastic is not wasted, but remade over and over” to keep “our families safer, and our planet cleaner.” At the end, the discarded packaging has been transformed into a circular arrow, meant to imply that plastic recycling is infinite.
The ad is from the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the plastic industry’s most powerful lobbying group, under its subsidiary America’s Plastic Makers. It’s part of one of the most expensive ad pushes in ACC’s 152-year history: So far, America’s Plastic Makers has spent nearly $30 million since 2023 to place ads touting “advanced recycling” and other sustainability measures, according to a HEATED analysis of data from ad insights firm Media Radar. That dwarfed the ACC’s lobbying spend over the same period by millions.
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