The largest fossil fuel companies in the world have invested billions of dollars in plastics production. For them, plastics are Plan B. Meaning they won’t let widespread efforts to reduce plastic pollution get in their way. As people throughout the world demand less plastic in their lives, the fossil fuel industry has developed a marketing scheme to make a plastic-filled world seem more sustainable: Advanced recycling.
Advanced recycling refers to a class of technologies that use heat and/or solvents to break plastic down into chemical building blocks. The fossil fuel industry wants us to think that these technologies can help solve our plastic recycling woes. But here’s the problem: Those chemical building blocks are toxic and climate-damaging.
Plastics are made by combining fossil fuels with toxic chemicals. Any facility that uses heat or solvents to break plastics down is going to be polluting and dangerous. On top of that, these advanced recycling facilities are expensive and have a long history of failure.
But the fossil fuel industry won’t let the reality of advanced recycling get in its way. The industry and its lobbyists are pushing state governments and our federal government to remove commonsense regulations and implement laws and programs that promote advanced recycling.
We need the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reject advanced recycling and the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to keep us hooked on a dangerous cycle of making and destroying plastic.
Take action with us – Urge the EPA to keep communities safe from “advanced recycling”
