2/22 Zero Waste Newsletter

Author

Zero Waste Coalition
February 22, 2024

Coalition Updates

  • Our next Coalition Meeting is on Monday 2/22 from 5-6PM in the SERC Space! You can also join online at this link. Remember that our meetings are required for coalition members and a great chance to promote events, build community, and participate in the discussion on Zero Waste at Cal. Peep the agenda here!

  • Campus Zero-waste updates

    • Berkeley now has an Amazon Plastic Mailer Recycling Program! If you ever buy anything on Amazon, you can drop off the mailers at the Amazon Hub in MLK. The materials will be transported to a DOW Chemical Company research facility to be sorted and evaluated for recycling

    • SERC’s Green Events Certification allows for clubs to receive funding for their events to be more sustainable! If you’re part of any other orgs make sure to apply here!

    • The Rentable grad gowns program will reduce waste by allowing people to rent grade gowns rather than having to buy them, as well as being a cheaper option that allows for better gowns. More information to come :)

  • Ongoing coalition projects!

    • We’re working on planning a Zero Waste Retreat! Give us your input at the coalition meeting!

    • Classroom chats are back! We’ll provide some zero waste goodies to you and people you talk to. Classroom chats are a way to easily reach a lot of people and educate them about Zero Waste at Cal, why it’s important, and sorting their waste. Reach out to your professors (especially if the class is environmental-related but also if it’s not, we need to reach everyone on campus!) and ask if you could give a quick presentation at the beginning of class or during Berkeley time. You could also reach out to clubs or other organizations you’re a part of! Get more info here!

    • Cooperative Reuse, the annual furniture exchange that happens at the end of the school year, is in the works! Sign up to get involved in the Student Coalition or learn more here (you can get paid)

Weekly Waste Wisdom!

The plastics industry and big oil have promoted recycling for decades despite knowing it’s not viable

The Center for Climate Integrity recently published a report titled, "The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis."

Plastics are part of a sector known as “petrochemicals,” or products made from fossil fuels such as oil and gas, with more than 99% of plastics being produced from fossil fuels. The vast majority of these plastics cannot be “recycled”—meaning they cannot be collected, processed, and remanufactured into new products— for a variety of reasons including having no end market, the toxicity, the degradation in quality, the many different kinds of plastics that need to be sorted, and the cost for recycling being higher than what it costs to produce new plastics. As of 2021, the U.S. recycling rate for plastic is estimated to be only 5-6%.

Plastics recycling has been promoted by big oil and the plastics industry for decades. They started by selling the public on plastic’s disposability, with the “solution” to waste being incineration and landfill. After backlash, they then switched to promoting recycling as the solution to waste. However, they knew from the start that it was not a solution. Back at a conference in 1989, the head of a trade group called the Vinyl Institute even acknowledged that "recycling cannot go on indefinitely, and does not solve the solid waste problem." Since then, the plastics industry as continued heavily campaigning recycling (and disinformation on recycling), despite multiple acknowledgements that it’s simply an unfeasible solution.

The amount of plastics waste produced by the US is only increasing, and so many resources have been spent to chase the dead-end of a solution that is plastics recycling, thanks to the efforts of these corporations. The real solution is to reduce the amount of plastic we use and shift away from single use plastics, which is what plastics companies are so adamantly against.

Read more on this topic here!

A registered scavenger, who mainly collects plastic waste to sell, walking in a landfill in Indonesia. (Yasuyoshi Chiba /AFP via Getty Images)