By Tom Hucker
The holiday shopping season is upon us, and Americans are expected to spend a whopping $1.1 trillion in holiday purchases this year.
Across the nation, discerning shoppers will seek out information to help them choose safe and healthy products for their families and friends. They will read warning labels to help them decide which toys might pose choking hazards, and which video games and movies are age-appropriate.
As party hosts prepare their office gatherings and holiday dinners, they will pore over nutrition labels to assess the saturated fat content in their gingerbread, the sodium in their stuffing and whether their turkey or ham is free of antibiotics or GMOs. And they might warn Uncle Frank about his cholesterol levels as he pours his second glass of eggnog.
All that information is easily available to conscious consumers. But unfortunately, holiday shoppers will find out very little about hundreds of toxic chemicals that are lurking in many of the gifts and foods they will purchase this season. Hardly any consumers will find labels warning them about foods or beauty products that contain phthalates, which are associated with reproductive harm.
Few shoppers will find out about the carcinogenic and unnecessary flame retardants that may be included with their child's new crib mattress or bedroom furniture. And most consumers will not realize that many of the new clothes or carpets they purchase may be covered in Teflon-like chemicals called PFAS, which are linked to cancer, low birth weight, immune system problems, and other harms.
Fortunately, the new 2018 Retailer Report Card shows holiday shoppers which retailers are taking steps to disclose and remove the worst toxic chemicals from the products they sell, and which ones don't seem to make this a priority. The newly expanded Retail Report Card was recently released by NRDC's partners in the Mind the Store coalition, with whom we work year-round to persuade retailers to reduce and eliminate the worst toxics from consumer products.
Using the Report Card, consumers can find out what their favorite retailers are doing to protect their customers from toxic chemicals—and what they're failing to do. The report finds that some major national retailers are taking significant actions to protect the public, while others show much less progress and are falling behind their competitors. The 2018 Retail Report Card ranks forty major retailers across 14 key criteria, so you are likely to find some interesting revelations about your favorite merchants.
Specifically, our coalition engages directly with retailers to urge them to develop an overall policy covering the worst toxic chemicals. The campaign then urges them to disclose the chemicals in products they sell and to phase out dangerous chemicals entirely from consumer products, often beginning with food, health and beauty items and products marketed for use by pregnant women, babies and young children.
Mind the Store
At a time when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Congress are failing to protect public health from dangerous chemicals, NRDC's market campaigns and our partnerships with coalitions like Mind the Store offer NRDC members a way to bring public pressure directly to retailers to convince them to get toxic chemicals out of the consumer products we rely on every day.
And this public pressure is paying off. This year alone, 18 retailers improved their score. Walgreens, Rite-Aid and Amazon are the most improved companies this year, since each announced a broad-based new chemicals policy. Walgreens and Rite Aid each pledged to eliminate a long list of the most dangerous chemicals from beauty, personal care and household cleaning products. And Amazon announced the first chemical policy for any dedicated e-commerce retailer, following negotiations with NRDC and Mind the Store that lasted over a year.
Mind the Store
Unfortunately, while many major retailers made progress in 2018, too many others are still not with the program. An unacceptable 19 of the 40 retailers surveyed received an F grade for failing to create even the most basic policies to address toxic chemicals in their products or their packaging—including Traders Joe's, Starbucks and many other food retailers.
But we have found that organized pressure from NRDC members can force retailers to take dramatic action to eliminate the worst chemicals. After several consumers died from using dangerous paint strippers, hundreds of thousands of NRDC members and others wrote to Lowe's to demand that they end their sales of paint strippers containing methylene chloride or a toxic substitute, NMP. Lowe's quickly agreed to remove all deadly paint strippers from their shelves by the end of 2018. And The Home Depot, Walmart, Sherwin-Williams, Kelly Moore, True Value Hardware and some Canadian retailers have all followed with similar pledges to end the sales of these toxic consumer products.
We need to continue our momentum. We need to make sure companies know that consumers are watching—by thanking the leaders for the steps they've taken and challenging the laggards to start taking toxic chemicals seriously. Click here to see the rankings of individual companies and to send an email to their CEOs urging them to follow our coalition's recommendations.
If we keep up the pressure from informed consumers, we'll have many more toxic-free consumer products available for your holiday shopping list next year.
The #EPA has released draft toxicity assessments for #GenX chemicals and #PFBS #Teflon @organic @organicconsumer https://t.co/w8FptZd0dy— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch)1542524171.0
According to Forbes, the Three R's sustainability catch-phrase, and the recycling cause it bolstered, remain synonymous with the U.S. environmental movement itself. There's only one problem: despite being touted as one of the most important personal actions that individuals can take to help the planet, "recycling" – as currently carried out in the U.S. – doesn't work and doesn't help.
Turns out, there is a vast divide between the misleading, popular notion of recycling as a "solution" to the American overconsumption problem and the darker reality of recycling as a failing business model.
The Myth: Recycling Began as a Plastics' Industry Marketing Tactic
A recycling dumpster in Los Angeles. Citizen of the Planet / Education Images / Universal Images Group / Getty Images
When it was first introduced, recycling likely had altruistic motivations, Forbes reported. However, the system that emerged was never equipped to handle high volumes. Unfortunately, as consumption increased, so too did promotion of recycling as a solution. The system "[gave] manufacturers of disposable items a way to essentially market overconsumption as environmentalism," Forbes reported. Then and now, "American consumers assuage any guilt they might feel about consuming mass quantities of unnecessary, disposable goods by dutifully tossing those items into their recycling bins and hauling them out to the curb each week."
Little has changed since that Forbes article, titled "Can Recycling Be Bad For The Environment?," was published almost a decade ago; increases in recycling have been eclipsed by much higher consumption rates. In fact, consumerism was at an all-time high in January 2020 before the pandemic hit, Trading Economics reported.
But, if the system doesn't work, why does it continue? Turns out, consumers were misled – by the oil and gas industry. News reports from September 2020 revealed how the plastic industry-funded ads in the 1980s that heralded recycling as a panacea to our growing waste problem. These makers of virgin plastics were the biggest proponents and financial sponsors of plastic recycling programs because they created the illusion of a sustainable, closed-cycle while actually promoting the continued use of raw materials for new single-use plastics.
To the masses, these programs justified overconsumption and eased concerns over trash that could be thrown into recycling bins, Forbes reported. Generations of well-meaning Americans since the 1970's and '80's – believing these communications masterminds – have dutifully used-then-recycled plastics and other materials. They trusted that their discards would be reborn as new goods instead of ending up in oceans and landfills.
The plastics industry went even further, lobbying 40 states to put the recycling triangle symbol on all plastic – even if it wasn't recyclable, Houston Public Media reported. This bolstered the public image of plastic as a renewable resource, but the cost was clarity about what actually can be recycled. As recent as 2020, a Greenpeace report found that many U.S. products labeled as recyclable could not actually be processed by most domestic material recovery facilities.
The Reality: Most Recyclables Aren't Being Recycled
An initial pre-sort removes contaminates, items that can't be recycled, at Republic Services in Anaheim, California on Thursday, April 15, 2021. Paul Bersebach / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register / Getty Images
The U.S. relies on single-stream recycling systems, in which recyclables of all sorts are placed into the same bin to be sorted and cleaned at recycling facilities. Well-meaning consumers are often over-inclusive, hoping to divert trash from landfills. Unfortunately, the trash often ends up there anyways – with the additional cost of someone at a recycling plant sorting through it.
The single-stream system is easier on consumers, but results in a mixed stream of materials that is easy to contaminate, hard to sort and more expensive to process. There are a variety of items – including dirty pizza boxes, old clothing, hangers, plastic bags, aerosols, batteries and electronics – that, if added to a residential recycling bin, will contaminate the entire batch of recyclables, a Miami recycling center representative told EcoWatch. At that point, it can be too costly and too dangerous for employees to hand-pick out erroneous items. Because these items cannot be processed in the same way as recyclable materials, their inclusion often means the whole batch will fetch a lower price from buyers or must be thrown away.
"Most people have the attitude that if they just put it in the blue bin, it will get taken away and somebody will figure out what to do with it, but putting something in the blue bin and actually recycling it are two very different things," said David Biderman, CEO and executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America.
Misunderstandings, misinformation and mislabeling aside, the harsh reality was and remains that most plastic can't and won't be recycled, reported NPR. For example, the EPA reported that plastic generation in 2018 was 35.7 million tons, accounting for 12.2 percent of municipal solid waste (MSW) that year. Of this total, only three million tons were recycled (an 8.7 percent recycling rate). The vast majority – 27 million tons – ended up in landfills, and the rest was combusted. The environmental agency also estimated that less than 10 percent of plastic thrown in bins in the last 40 years has actually been recycled.
The situation is slightly better for other recyclables, though they make up a smaller percentage of MSW. For example, glass products totaled 12.3 million tons in 2018, or 4.2 percent of the annual MSW generation. Almost 25 percent of glass was recycled, 61.6 percent ended up in landfills and 13.4 percent was combusted.
Post-consumer paper and cardboard for 2018 totaled 67.4 million tons, or 23.1 percent of total MSW generation for the year. The material also had the highest recycling rate of any other material in MSW – 68.2 percent. 25.6 percent of paper ended up in landfills and 6.23 percent was combusted.
According to this EPA data, recyclable plastics, glass and paper accounted for 18.5 percent, 5.2 percent and 11.8 percent of MSW landfilled in 2018, respectively. Those three materials alone comprised 35.5 percent of the total landfilled trash in the U.S. for the year; had they been properly collected, processed and purchased, they theoretically could have been diverted and recycled.
The Reason: Recycling Is Bad Business Around the World
Recyclable waste must be sorted, cleaned and processed before it can be sold as a commodity on the open market. Nareeta Martin / Unsplash
Unfortunately, the EPA data also shows that 2018 was not an anomaly but rather another data point showing how the single-stream system in the U.S. has never been economically viable or feasible on a large scale. To further understand why recycling in America is failing, we need to think of recycled goods as commodities – because that's what they are.
According to the recycling center representative, municipalities and counties pay for residential and commercial recyclables to be trucked to local and regional recycling plants for processing. Clean batches are sorted and/or compressed into bales of similar plastics, paper, aluminum or glass. The centers sell the cleaned recyclables on the open market to buyers who will process them into recycled materials like plastic pellets or post-consumer paper; these can be turned into new products.
This entire process – the processing and creation of saleable recycled goods – costs money. As with any good, profitability requires selling for a higher price than it costs to make. Contaminated batches are harder to process into new products and therefore fetch a lower price on the market, if they can be sold at all. Currently, U.S. recyclables are no longer profitable, and no one wants to buy them.
China used to buy the majority of the world's plastics and paper for recycling, The New York Times reported. The U.S. has been the #1 generator of plastic waste in the world for years and used to ship more than half of its total plastic production to China, a November 2020 study found. The research also noted that up to one-fourth of American plastics sent abroad were contaminated or of poor quality, which would make it extremely difficult to recycle anyways.
Starting Jan. 1, 2018, China banned imports of most scrap materials because shipments were too contaminated, The Times reported; the country no longer wanted to be the "world's garbage dump."
As a result, the U.S. and other Western nations who had relied on China to offload their recyclables saw a "mounting crisis" of paper and plastic waste building up in ports and recycling facilities, The Times reported.
The Western nations began sending recyclable waste to other Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, India and Malaysia. These countries often lacked the infrastructure to handle recyclables, so a lot of the waste ended up incinerated or landfilled
In response, in 2019, the United Nations passed an amendment to the Basel Convention hoping to protect the poor and developing countries who'd taken up China's vacated role in the global recycling trade. The amendment ambitiously aimed to clean up the global trade in plastic waste, making it more transparent and better regulated and allowing developing countries to reject contaminated shipments. The U.S. did not ratify the amendment, and new evidence suggests it continues to send illegal and/or contaminated shipments to developing countries.
Domestically, the closing of the Chinese market to U.S. recyclables bankrupted many domestic recycling programs because there was too much supply and no real demand. The smaller Asian countries could not accept nearly as much as China had. Prices of recyclables dropped, and bales of scrap materials were sent to landfills and incinerators when they couldn't be sold, another Times article reported.
This left waste-management companies around the country with no market for recyclabes, The Atlantic reported. They've been forced to go back to cities and municipalities with two choices: pay a lot more to get rid of their recycling or throw it away. The news report noted that most are choosing the latter.
"The economics are challenging," agreed Nilda Mesa, director of the Urban Sustainability and Equity Planning Program at the Earth Institute's Center for Sustainable Urban Development. "If there is not a market for the recycled material, then the numbers do not work for these facilities as well as cities, as they need to sell the materials to recoup their costs of collection and transportation, and even then it's typically only a portion of the costs," Columbia's State of the Planet reported.
Tiffany Duong is an avid ocean advocate. She holds degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and is an Al Gore Climate Reality Leader and student member of The Explorer's Club.
She spent years as a renewable energy lawyer in L.A. before moving to the Amazon to conduct conservation fieldwork (and revamp her life). She eventually landed in the Florida Keys as a scientific scuba diver and field reporter and writes about the oceans, climate, and the environment from her slice of paradise. Follow her on Twitter/Instagram @lilicedt.
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