Recycling Ads Sold Us on Loving Pollution

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Not to go all pickup truck bumper sticker on you, but I've sat through Christopher Nolan movies that made better sense than recycling—and I mean on first watch. Plastic is supposed to last 400 years but here I am, tossing a straw that could’ve been a history lesson after a single use like it’s not gonna choke 20 generations of seagulls after outliving me. Why can’t I just keep it on a kitchen cabinet and add a footnote to my testament?

Plastic was designed to last anyway.

It was marketed as this revolutionary, long-lasting "material of a thousand uses," which is ironic because for half a century the only use of plastics was to make World War II affordable so we could turn Hitler into a cautionary tale. Thing is, when you have a giant plastic company and demand for nylon parachutes dries out, you'd be quick to realise it's hard to find a profit margin on a 200-year-old Tupperware if it keeps getting passed on through generations like a bloody engagement ring. So you have an idea.

You start printing ads.

You start selling single-use, disposable plastics like it's the biggest lifestyle innovation since the first primordial swamp-dweller life form went terrestrial. Refilling soft drink bottles? That's for cave-painting troglodytes. We the modern consumers don't do second chances; we discard after one use like Gotye did with his music career. So step fully into this thoughtless, profit-driven celluloid future or go limp off a ditch and turn into a fossil—for you are strictly old-fashioned.

Lady on the left having a stroke trying to figure out how is she gonna refill her bottles when she has no hands left. Classic selling trick. (credit)

Fast forward to today and we have a continent of garbage drifting through the Pacific.

Like an ass-holing dirtbag butterfly effect from hell, now plastic is an essential food group for fish and a hanged noose for baby seals—which is bad PR. If your product is found to have choked a turtle to death you better pray that turtle was a wanted pedophile (else you'll have trouble salvaging your public image). To be fair, hippies meant well when they tried to talk down on trash (trash-talking if you will), but unfortunately, this series of reputation bombings only pushed corporate giants to their biggest idea yet...

Recycling ad campaigns.

Color-code some dumpsters, slap a "recycling symbol" here and there, show us a starving polar bear with less body fat percentage than a Mr Olympia lineup, and voilà: now it's the consumer's responsibility. If plastic bottles aren't being turned into dildos is because the consumer failed to appropriately segregate their trash.

Think about it: plastic manufacturers have a whole corporate playbook of false solutions to the climate crisis:

• Coca-Cola loves to shoot a line about its sustainable packaging initiatives. Here’s Coca-Cola giving a scarce amount of fucks backstage.

• The famous ‘Crying Indian’ ad 1) did not feature an Indian, but a Native American, 2) did not cast a Native American actor, but an Italian one, 3) did not tell the truth when saying that “plastic pollution is people’s fault,” and 4) was funded by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dixie Cups.

• Never carpool again to make a half-assed point about environmental responsibility. It’s just another stunt to keep you busy while real solutions are lobbied into oblivion. You’d be better off carpooling to make sexual advancements on strangers.

• Just because you see a package with a symbol of three arrows smelling each other’s assholes doesn’t mean it can be recycled. A lot of products with the resin identification code can’t.

Recycling doesn't work as advertised.

It made us more environmentally conscious. It filled David Attenborough's IMDb page with narrator credits. Thanks for that. But the reality is that only 10% of all plastic can be reused. We like to think of recycling plants as this kind of tooth fairy of trash that can turn everything into a bench or a traffic cone, but that's just some top-tier bullshitting we collectively engage with so we don't feel guilty that our Amazon Prime parcels have 3 layers of plastic wrapping.

Jump to this conclusion: the act of throwing stuff in the trash like someone’s gonna wave a magic wand and turn it into a bird feeder has its own name, “wishcycling.” Of course, birds will eat it as you threw it, then puke it beyond the shore, where it will be eaten again by some fish and somehow find its way back to your sushi plate.

So, technically...

Recycling ads sold us on loving pollution. First, they shifted the responsibility from the makers to the consumers, then provided a scapegoat marketing stunt called "recycling" so we could virtuously clutter up the planet with the smothering detritus that is 21st-century consumerism. Once you start looking into it, recycling is the climate's saviour as much as my ass is a trumpet, but greed is a powerful impulse. I bet these plastic tycoons would make the world burn if they found out ashes were a currency.

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