By now we’re all getting pretty used to recycling.
And the good news is that as we get better at recycling, more and more facilities are popping up to make the whole process easier for everyone.
And that’s a great thing: as plastic is made from oil, which is a fossil fuel, the less plastic we make the better.
As we cut down on our plastic use, recycling our single-use plastics means that they can be made into new plastic, cutting out our reliance on oil to make this everyday product.
But what happens if we have done the right thing in recycling our plastic, but our recycling facilities aren’t doing the right thing?
Keen recycler, activist, and Houston resident Brandy Deason was suspicious about what was actually happening to the single use plastic products that she recycled.
So, in partnership with CBS and Inside Climate News she hid an Apple Tag in her bag of plastic recycling, to enable her to track where her trash ended up.
And the result was shocking.
Though the recycling organisation seemed legit and well meaning, what happened inside was not quite as the company described.
Like other unsuspecting householders, Deason dropped off her recycling with the Houston Recycling Collaboration.
Secretly, her bag contained a tag that allowed her to see what happened to that bag of trash after she left.
The plastic, she discovered, was not melted down as promised.
The bag – complete with its tracking tag – moved to Wright Waste Management. This is no melting facility; instead, it is a large general waste facility, where drone footage shows enormous piles of trash.
Not only is this a betrayal of the well-meaning recycler, this amount of plastic is a hazard in itself.
As well as being horrified that her waste was not being disposed of in a responsible, environmentally-friendly way, Deason was shocked by the risks that the companies were taking:
“Should that catch fire, the emissions coming off of that could be really poisonous to the people that live around here,” she told ICN, “not to mention a dangerous, large fire like that could spread into a neighborhood.”
It may be no surprise that the Texas-based waste company was not taking their fire precautions, and their responsibilities to the local neighborhood and the environment seriously, even failing their fire marshal inspections regularly over a course of two years.
So not only was the plastic not recycled as promised, but it became a hazard to the environment too.
It is shocking that these companies that we trust with our recyclables can discard them in such an irresponsible way.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about why we should be worried about the leak in the bottom of the ocean.