Wasteland The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future

It's certainly true that for a long time, the plastics industry has known that not a lot of recycling is actually happening.

They've known that a lot of these products are not very easily recyclable and that when they are recyclable, they degrade so that they're not, you know, infinite closed loop things where you can keep living on forever and ever.

And a lot of these cases that these products are so low value or they're so difficult to recycle that what you're producing is essentially worthless.

One of the things that really shocked me was the way in which a lot of these companies have over the decades systematically made promises about recycling, knowing that they were going to break them.

I use in the book, I give the example of the Coca-Cola company, which in the 1990s was making these big pledges that it was going to make its bottles out of recycled plastic. And then a couple of years go by and the economy takes a downturn and they kind of quietly shelve this promise. They never do it. And then it happens again in the early 2000s. You know, they make a big recycling promise and everybody reports on it. And then it quietly doesn't happen at least four or five times in the past two decades, they've done this and they've never actually followed through.