Even a majority of Republicans support efforts to hold manufacturers accountable for allegedly deceptive claims
Concern about the fossil fuel and plastics industries’ alleged deception about recycling is growing, with new polling showing a majority of American voters, including 54% of Republicans, support legal efforts to hold the sectors accountable.
The industries have faced increasing scrutiny for their role in the global plastics pollution crisis, including an ongoing California investigation and dozens of suits filed over the last decade against consumer brands that sell plastics.
Research published earlier this year found that plastic producers have known for decades that plastic recycling is too cumbersome and expensive to ever become a feasible waste management solution, but promoted it to the public anyway.
Remember in the 70s when the cigarette industry said their products were safe?
Remember in the 80s when the candy industry said it was the lack of exercise that was the cause of overweight?
Remember in the 90s when the gun industry pointed the blame to personal responsibility as the cause of school shootings?
Maybe just maybe industries can’t self regulate. I can go on.
Whistleblowers should be treated like heroes. Like not just protections where the reward is that they get to keep their job working for a company that is probably going to feel hostile towards them, but reward them so that they don’t need to work with that company anymore.
Publically funded science (done in the interest of the public rather than profit for universities or publishers) should also be ramped up so that it has the resources to examine these questions, too.
Also, criminal charges for execs that suppress information that prefers profits over safety.
The CTO of the previous company (1000+ employees , multinational) where I worked as an exec right under the CTO had a habit of not being able to keep his hands to himself. He was married but had a taste for men working under him.
Hed beeen around pulling shit for months until i was called in, i met him in person, he immediately started to “just tickle” me, and I reported his ass right away. Internal investigations were had and they fired him.
But not after allowing him as his final act to fire me because I was “not management material”, had nothing to do with me blowing the whistle on him feeling up his employees. The company allowed him to do this because i was now a risk to them.
So the lesson here is to keep your head down, enable abusers, lest you want your career in the shitter
Edit: I fully agree with you, but the way it currently stands it’s impossible to fight back to high level execs
Sounds like a slam dunk lawsuit my dude.
This is the way. If every company knew firing a whistleblower would result in a successful lawsuit against them, they would not do it anymore.
Pretty sure all those industries continue doing all that shit today
You missed cars. 😁
Please go on, not that I need convincing, but would like to hear more, idk when was led? 60s?
Legislation on packaging should really be entertained as well. For many products a biodegradable form of packaging would be completely viable.
Impossible, the only appropriate package for our premium scissors is comparably premium clamshell plastic. That you need scissors to open.
Imagine if they sold can openers inside sealed tin cans… And not the kind with the pull tab.
All companies should be required to recycle their own products. No… not via contracts with 3rd parties. Products go back up through the sales channels untill they reach the manufacturers.
If you don’t have an idea how your products end of life works, you cannot sell or manufacture it.
Solves e-waste, plastic, chemicals… a lot of the god awful stuff.
Put a per gram tax on every manufactured product and watch how companies magically find alternative materials/methods to make goods.
You mean: how they will raise prices to account for that.
“They’ll just raise prices” is corporate propaganda. Making them raise prices for carrying on using plastic is the whole point.
Other people will make packaging out of something else, and the people still stubbornly using plastic will see their sales go down.
You just have to make the tax large enough to encourage the use of other materials, and keep raising it once other materials become the norm. Otherwise you just see that 2.5% charge become a 5% price rise and everyone just carries on.
But the Republicans are going to vote for the guy who will sell them down the river Jan 20st 2025.
Fucking.
Morons.
Use to make machines for the plastic industry. None of them wanted tp use recycled plastic, because raw plastic pellets were cheaper and recycled plastic was harsher on the machines.
Recycled plastic is also terrible if you have any type of quality standards you have to meet. You generally end up creating even more scrap because the regrind always has some amount of contamination in it, and never performs the same as virgin.
Yep. When we made recycled units, the bearings got shredded and the drive motors got burnt out faster.
That’s why recycling goes after reduce and reuse.
Recycled plastic is also inferior quality with worse structural properties so it’s not really suitable for many applications.
Yep, regrind was bad.
Not saying anyone shouldn’t recycle. Just saying in our world of cheap is God, why fight?
We need to put some of these CEOs on trial like we did with the Nazi’s hopefully all of them will get their just punishment.
I was just following orders.
Don’t worry, the industry wants looser rules on what can be considered recyclable. They want to be able to label things as recyclable even if the majority of people do not have access to a recycling facility that can recycle it. Fuck them. Honestly, we should force them to be the ones to recycle the plastic if they want to label it as recyclable.
“Most US voters say” AKA Not Gonna Happen.
Yeah we have a government that represents corporations.
Plastic recycling is a farce to make it appear as a “personal responsibility” issue.
Notice also how the labeling for plastics uses a sign that looks remarkably similar to a recycling logo - whether that specific type of plastic is actually recyclable or not.
It is all a public relation campaign, because fundamentally plastic is unsustainable and harmful. Governments have collectively shat the bed by placing the burden of dealing with plastic on the consumer. (This is very similar to the “carbon footprint” idea - which was a creation of the oil industry.)
I toured the place where my city collects its plastic recycling - the director in charge was very open about the fact that most of it isn’t used and can’t really be used anyway.
In think plastic recycling is true and makes sense to do. I do it every week. However, all the plastic users need to act to limit it’s use to functionality based requirements…can anything at all be used instead of plastic in this situation??? There’s like 0 need to use plastic to box and ship things. Are you shipping an optic? Glass? A large flat TV? Okay there you should use plastics. Those plastics could be reusable first but also recyclable and the people selling the TV should be responsible for paying for the packaging to eventually get recycled. A watermelon 🍉 is way more fragile than a TV and we don’t box those things. Only Costco has the brains to box fruit individually. That’s just a waste.
