“America Recycles Day” was last Saturday. Recycling is a good thing to do, it has a place in a circular, zero waste society, but it is by no means the answer. There’s a reason it comes at the end of the 5 R’s- Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Rot, Recycle. We cannot recycle our way out of the plastic crisis. Three of the corporations behind American Recycles Day are Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle- regular fixtures in our blog. These companies really want us to recycle, but do they? Coke uses only 9% of post-consumer plastic, Pepsi only uses 3% post consumer plastic content, and Nestle only uses 2% post consumer plastic. Some of the other companies that are telling us to recycle on America Recycles Day include Dow Chemicals, McDonalds, Clorox, Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company, Keurig/Dr Pepper, and Altria. Recycling is good, stopping waste at its source is better. Until these companies support policies like extended producer responsibility, and bottle bills, their calls for us to “recycle more” ring hollow. You can read a detailed description of America Recycles Day and its deception here. 

This isn’t the first time we’ve said product manufacturers need to be held accountable for their product’s entire lifecycle. Auto shops aren’t allowed to dispose of oil in the creek behind their shop. Coke should be preventing their bottles from reaching the environment and PepsiCo should make sure their Doritos wrappers don’t end up floating down the Potomac. Tetra Pak should make sure their juice box doesn’t get trapped in a beaver lodge.

Tetra Pak is the largest packaging company on the planet, with about $13 billion in sales every year. Tetra Pak makes packaging for things like juice boxes, milk cartons and chicken broth. They look like glossy cardboard, but are actually a complicated combination of multiple materials including polyethylene and aluminum. Tetra Pak makes the claim their products are 100% recyclable. Their global recycling rate in 2018 was 26%. Tetra Pak has said 70 million US households have access to facilities that will recycle their products. While it is difficult to determine what “access” means, it’s not difficult to determine there are about 50 million US households without any access to facilities that recycle Tetra Paks. Additionally, when these products are “recycled” they are shipped in giant bales to facilities in Mexico, where the byproduct is typically used to make cement. Here’s a deep dive into Tetra Pak’s greenwashed marketing scheme. 

Endangered species sighting: A few days ago, a five foot Atlantic Sturgeon was found washed ashore in Virginia Beach. Atlantic sturgeon are endangered but have been on the planet for over 120 million years- they were here with dinosaurs! Atlantic sturgeon aren’t usually what people think of when Fairfax County or the Potomac River are mentioned, but our home used to be their spawning ground.  Overfishing and human expansion pushed sturgeon to the brink of extinction, but there are multiple efforts to help the species recover. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science has been collaborating with groups in Virginia and federal agencies to create new strategies in Virginia waters. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources monitor receivers on tagged sturgeon to study migratory patterns, spawning habits, and where the fish spend the winter months.

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Drilling: One of the big stories from this week was the announcement that oil and gas companies have been asked to submit their proposals to extract oil and natural gas from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This directive doesn’t only open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, almost 400,000 of federal land in the Lower 48 states will be auctioned off in the next two months. Immediately after the announcement, Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, the National Audubon Society, and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit. The Gwich’in Steering Committee has also filed a lawsuit to protect their sacred ancestral land. Hope is not lost, last week a federal judge ruled that the Bureau of Land Management failed to disclose the climate impacts for a proposal to frack oil and gas on 300,000 acres in Wyoming which has stopped (temporarily) the operation. It is also important to note that Royal Dutch Shell ended their Arctic exploration in 2015 because there wasn’t enough oil and gas to make the operation economically viable. Read the latest developments to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge here.