Oh the irony. I don’t want any Alanis Morissette haters analyzing my use of the word irony because this situation is close enough. A division of Cargill called NatureWorks that produces a renewable and compostable plastic packaging material is getting heat because its environmentally-friendly plastic is hard to recycle. What the f*ck? I’m serious. Recyclers are up in arms because the product doesn’t contain an oil base, which apparently is required for current recycling methods. I’m not making this up.

Recycling groups have even threatened negative advertising of the plastic, known as PLA, if the company continues to introduce its use in mainstream consumer products. According to this article:

” . . . bottles made of PLA cause problems for recyclers for a couple of reasons. First, they can’t be easily separated from bottles made of oil-based PET, the most commonly used material in clear, plastic bottles. (Costly infrared sorting equipment will separate the two, but many small-scale recyclers separate different plastics by mechanical methods or even by hand.) Too many PLA bottles will contaminate the PET waste. Second, PET is a valuable commodity – it can be sold for 15 or 20 cents a pound, and makes up 10 percent of the revenues of some recycling centers. The sale of recycled commodities helps finance the curbside pickup of bottles, cans and paper.”

So basically there are systemic problems with introducing an environmentally friendly product into the chain of production and recycling of environmentally harmful products. Woe is me!

‘Gary Liss, a recycling industry consultant and an advocate of “Zero Waste” – meaning that everything we throw away gets recycled or reused – warns that PLA, especially in bottles, could end up creating as many problems as it solves. “Don’t introduce these into the system,” Liss says “until you can figure out a way to identify them and keep them out of a whole elaborate system that has been developed.” Such questions reflect a fuller understanding of sustainability, which encompasses how products are made and consumed and where they end up.‘

The bolding of text in the above paragraph is mine. That’s the end goal people! Hopefully NatureWorks and the recycling community can figure out a way to incorporate PLA into the traditional recycling process or adapt the recycling process in a cost-effective way to handle PLA. If not, we’ll have only demonstrated how destructive the path we’re on really is. Being unable to introduce environmentally friendly products because the very system of production and recycling with which we operate can’t handle it is disheartening to say the least.