{"id":68702,"date":"2024-06-21T13:53:14","date_gmt":"2024-06-21T18:53:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68702"},"modified":"2024-06-21T13:53:14","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T18:53:14","slug":"selling-a-mirage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=68702","title":{"rendered":"Selling a Mirage"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Selling a Mirage<\/a><\/h3>\n

The world is drowning in\u00a0plastic.<\/strong><\/div>\n

Experts say we need to stop making so\u00a0much.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the plastics industry is peddling a \u201csolution\u201d that works like\u00a0magic.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Don’t be fooled.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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LAST YEAR,<\/span>\u00a0I became obsessed with a plastic cup.<\/p>\n

It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I\u2019d seen born of what\u2019s being touted as a cure for a crisis.<\/p>\n

Plastic doesn\u2019t break down in nature. If you turned all of what\u2019s been made into cling wrap, it would\u00a0cover every inch of the globe<\/a>. It\u2019s piling up,\u00a0leaching into our water<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0poisoning our bodies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.<\/p>\n

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the\u00a01980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 one that can be solved with recycling.<\/p>\n

Industry leaders knew then<\/a>\u00a0what we know now: Traditional recycling\u00a0would\u00a0<\/a>barely put a dent in the trash heap<\/a>. It\u2019s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.<\/p>\n

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an \u201cadvanced\u201dtype of recycling known as pyrolysis \u2014 \u201cpyro\u201d means fire and \u201clysis\u201d means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.<\/p>\n

While old-school, \u201cmechanical\u201d recycling yields plastic that\u2019s degraded or contaminated, this type of \u201cchemical\u201d recycling promises plastic that behaves like it\u2019s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution…<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Selling a Mirage The world is drowning in\u00a0plastic. Experts say we need to stop making so\u00a0much. But the plastics industry is peddling a \u201csolution\u201d that works like\u00a0magic. Don’t be fooled. LAST YEAR,\u00a0I became obsessed with a plastic cup. It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[34727,33251,1857,12960,671],"class_list":["post-68702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-lisa-song","tag-plastic-recycling","tag-plastics","tag-propublica","tag-recycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68703,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68702\/revisions\/68703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}