California lies about plastic recycling: Happy Earth Day

Recycling in America has long been controversial, and nowhere more so than in California, where “waste recycling” was only recently one of California’s top exports.

No one believed China recycled it, but saying they did was good enough for politicians and coastal elites, so California claimed they were meeting pollution targets – adding new items to dump in those blue bins that went to Chinese landfills for the next 300 years.

Like electric car batteries, saying something can be recycled doesn’t mean much of it can or will. Greasy pizza boxes and plastic water bottles are considered recyclable, but how naive do you have to be to believe that?

Naive about electric cars and solar panels, which is a lot, which is why recycling is such a big business in the state, but it does even less for the environment than wasting $5 billion on mandatory food composting.

I’ve been saying for years that recycling is a government scam that doesn’t help anything, and that plastic is the worst fraud of all. Perhaps 5 percent of plastic can be recycled and the cost is almost as prohibitive as recycling what little can be reused from an electric car battery. Recycling is ultimately worse for the environment than making new products.

The new criticism of plastic is that the plastic industry is behind it. Greenwashing is nothing new. Al Gore made $400 million scamming companies and people out of carbon credits and planting trees that did nothing for the climate or pollution, so the plastics industry isn’t some special trader who’s having doubts because he claims his products are recycled.

State governments encouraged this. They used taxpayer money to create TV ads telling people to recycle plastic. While there is no scientific legitimacy to plastic recycling, there is also no question that existing solar panels are anything but a tax on the poor to make the rich feel better.

Exxon noted 30 years ago that they did not believe recycling would improve with government mandates and subsidies – because no product has ever improved with government mandates and subsidies. Exxon applauded the effort, but did not believe the results would be worth it – unless there was a free market reason for it.

No one believed that plastic recycling would work without more basic research – so why did politicians in California push it away from people? For the same reason the state has wasted a small fortune on government composting; the appearance of action is more important than people or the environment.