America’s Recycling Problem:
Tonight into plastic bags, so many Americans dropped them off in the recycling bins at big box stores, but here’s the question: what happens to them after that? Where do those bags end? Americans go through a hundred billion plastic bags each year.
Navy scenery spent the past six months investigating how they’re recycled. We’re at a Target on the north side of Austin, and we teamed up with nine of our affiliates in owned stations to superglue 46 tracking devices onto small bundles of ordinary recyclable plastic bags.
I got four and five and deposited those in bins labelled for plastic bag recycling at Walmart and Target stores across 10 states. Walmart and Target are among multiple big box stores participating in a national directory that steers customers to places where they can recycle plastic bags.
Only four last pinged in places that say they are involved with recycling plastic bags. 23 last pinged in landfills and incinerators How much of what people think is being recycled actually ends up here at an incinerator.
The amount of resources that we’re able to cover to recover across the whole globe right now is around 9 How much do people think that they’re recycling? I think they think it’s a lot more in accordance with Target said they’re committed to looking at our processes to improve our recycling efforts, and Walmart said it’s pursuing initiatives to reduce the use of single-use plastic, including plastic bags.
I hope you understand that the first time we asked the American Chemistry Council, which began promoting the Big Box store drop-off concept about a decade ago, about how few of the bags actually made it to a potential recycler, the American Chemistry Council said that the plastic drop-off recycling programme at retailers doesn’t work on the scale that we want, which will frustrate many of our viewers who take the bags or those recycling locations.
Just today, the organization that manages that list of retail stores told us that it has now dropped all Walmart and Target stores from its national list until they can confirm that those recyclable plastic materials are actually being recycled and not sent to a landfill or an incinerator.
