Humanity has an idiosyncratic relationship with plastics. On the one hand, plastics keep food fresh for extended periods, provide people with materials to make their lives easier, and have given rise to a massive industry promoting economic growth. On the other hand, plastics proliferation, mismanagement, and a paucity of processing infrastructure have led to a colossal pollution issue.
Unfortunately, several companies, organizations, and groups pay more attention to plastics' disadvantages, particularly those in the recycling industry. What's worse, focusing on these problems muddles the public's perception of recycling. Thus, many attacks on the recycling industry qualify as a form of greenwashing.
What is greenwashing? Generally, greenwashing occurs when a company disperses misleading or false information about a product's environmentally friendliness. Usually, companies commit greenwashing to score ESG (environment, social, governance) points with investors, appear eco-friendly to consumers, and gain an edge over the competition while fattening their bottom line. In November's blog, we'll give two major instances of greenwashing, one committed by the shipping line CMA CGM and the other by all those who propel the idea that PLA is an environmentally friendly, compostable, and recyclable bioplastic.
Greenwashing Recycled Plastics
Multiple companies and organizations are leading a foolish charge against the recycled-plastics industry. These clowns constantly bemoan wild claims and utter insanely nonsensical points, such as plastic not being recyclable and having little to no value for humanity. Unfortunately, voices from this ideological circus have affected policymakers in governments and companies worldwide. Unsurprisingly, the results have harmed the environment, businesses, and stakeholders at every level.
CMA CGM Scrap Plastic Ban
In the summer of 2022, CMA CGM, one of the world's most prominent shipping lines, made a fateful decision. Their choice? Ban all plastic scrap from onboarding any CMA CGM chartered vessel. When CMA CGM announced this sudden policy shift less than six months before implementing the rule, staunch environmental groups cheered and popped the champagne. They gleefully and condescendingly explained that a significant waste-creation enabler was acting responsibly. While they might have missed the fact that the shipping industry itself emits its fair share of carbon dioxide, these groups definitely do not understand that plastic scrap is a valuable raw material.
Anyone involved in the plastics recycling industry—whether a trader, manufacturer, machinery engineer, or processor, knows that recycling starts with collection. And developed countries ALL have waste collection schemes. After filling their trucks, collectors bring this post-consumer "waste" to a materials recovery facility (MRF). Proper commoditization of the scrap begins at the MRF. Here, workers place the plastic scrap on large conveyor belts, which run under near-infrared (NIR) optical sorting machines. These highly-capable and technologically intelligent machines instantly recognize the plastic they're calibrated to detect. For example, when operators set the NIR machines to HDPE, any HDPE bottle that runs under the sensor will get air-blasted off the conveyor from an underlying nozzle. Workers then collect the plastic-type and sort it further. In this way, mixed-plastic scrap gets sorted into high-value plastic bales that can contain about over 99% (in mass) of a single plastic type. Usually, the remaining 1% are caps and labels left on the bottle. Processors remove these during shredding. However, most people don't realize that processed caps and labels have significant value, too.
CMA CGM's plastic-waste ban disregards the existence of commoditized plastic bales. While CMA CGM claims that this ban prevents irresponsible businesses from shipping their waste to developing countries, it penalizes legitimate companies that have invested time and capital in infrastructure, human resources, and ongoing process optimization in commoditizing post-consumer waste.
A more rational and commerce-friendly decision CMA CGM could have made would have been to accept single-stream bales and reject commingled/mixed plastic bales. What are commingled/mixed plastic bales? These are what they sound like—several types of plastic put into one bale. While commingled bales contain valuable plastic types ripe for recycling (HDPE, PET, PP, etc.), they may also contain heavily soiled film and other waste products that processors can't recycle. Thus, when a company purchases mixed bales, it inevitably will have some waste that it must send to a landfill. Herein lies the conundrum for processors in countries that don't have landfill space or proper incineration facilities. So, enacting a ban on mixed plastic exports isn't irrational.
However, single-stream bales are always priced at a premium when compared to mixed bales, and processors usually prefer to purchase single-stream bales for their feedstock. Most importantly, single-stream bales do not contain significant amounts of waste. Many times, single-stream bales are completely waste-free. Counterintuitively, banning the export of these bales reduces the chance of recycling them in origin-countries. This is because additional recycling infrastructure would be needed to process the influx of domestic bales. Ultimately, export bans could lead to more plastic being landfilled, which is an utter shame considering the value it has to importers and exporters. It also hurts business that rely on importing to source clean, high-quality bales.
We recommend that businesses and countries allow the export and import of single-stream plastics. However, there is one caveat that single-stream plastic buyers must always vigilantly mitigate: the threat of scammers who advertise, provide photos of, and even rent warehouse space for single-stream plastics but, in the end, commit fraud by shipping garbage instead of the material agreed up on their purchasing contract.
Expert Scammer: OzShred
Scammers lurk in all corners of the globe. A particularly putrid example of scamming excrement set up a racket in Melbourne, Australia. This scam artist, known as OzShred, used the warehouse mentioned in the previous link to lure consumers into believing they ran a legitimate sorting and baling operation. Potential clients would even visit OzShred's warehouse, which served as a ploy cloaking a significant scam.
Unfortunately, the material OzShred sold was not as advertised. Instead, clients would receive containers with mixed-plastic bales (the invoices established the bales being purchased were single stream) mixed with other bales, hidden from the pictures, of completely unusable film waste. Readers can find more instances of OzShred defrauding unknowing clients by perusing various entries on a popular Australian message board or checking out this Vietnamese importer's experience with OzShred—the site copy is all Vietnamese. Thankfully, it's 2022, and there's Google Translate.
OzShred ran a highly-organized scam complete with a warehouse and staff. It defrauded companies, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars (we're not kidding). OzShred's unscrupulous actions also left importers with several tons of unusable waste, bearing financial and environmental costs.
How does a government safeguard against scammers like OzShred? About a year after ABC News Australia published the above article, the Australian government banned the export of all mixed plastic bales. And they didn't stop there. If a company wished to export single-stream bales, it was required to complete a few key pieces of paperwork with the material origin's site address and the people in charge. Europe also requires similar paperwork to import and export single-stream plastics. Such documentation holds originators responsible for providing high-quality scrap bales. The documentation also requires the exporter to have all the end-user's information—this includes import licenses (if the country in which the end-user is domiciled needs it), government EPA certifications, and business licenses. Parties caught forging documents will face legal ramifications.
Unfortunately, Australia banned the export of all plastic bales from July 1st, 2022, as the government estimated that it has ample recycling infrastructure to process all plastic waste. Although we know this policy has damaged profitability for legitimate, single-stream plastics exporters, we're still determining how much the export ban will affect the Australian environment. However, we do know that Australia currently only recycles 12.4% of all plastic waste domestically. This fact almost proves the point we made earlier.
Thus, many recyclers are concerned about the Australian scrap plastic export ban. Island Leaf can also attest to the anxiety. In the past, Island Leaf worked with a few significant Australian exporters of single-stream bales. As a result, we helped source thousands of tons of single-stream HDPE and PET for responsible end-users in Europe, Asia, and North and Central America.
Ultimately, we believe that export bans on plastic bales is a short-sighted form of greenwashing. While scams have always existed, laws now dictate that all exporters must follow a strict documentation policy. Completing the paperwork requires a solid relationship between the exporter and any middlemen, as well as some extra document work. Such regulation ensures that con artists never excrete an OzShred-like scam on honest business people. Most importantly, disallowing single-stream plastic bales from being shipped harms legitimate recyclers. In some places (like Europe), the recycling industry is very built up, so it's difficult for many processors to source European materials. This means they must look to other countries. If all shipping lines followed CMA CGM's lead of completely barring single-stream plastic bales from being shipped, single-stream bale pricing would skyrocket in local markets. It would most likely have unforeseen consequences for national economies.
Greenwashing PLA
Greenwashing also occurs when companies try to convince consumers that they have biodegradable products, when they really don't. Companies producing and marketing PLA (poly-lactic acid) straws to be 100% biodegradable, home and garden compostable, or completely eco-friendly qualify as classic greenwashers. PLA is a bioplastic because manufacturers use synthesized corn, soybean, or sugar fibers to produce it. Despite being plant-based, PLA's inability to biodegrade in a natural environment makes it a contradiction-ridden material. If you've paid attention, you know that only some PLA types can biodegrade at a constant temperature of over 50°C. And this temperature must be held steady for months.
PLA's high maintenance for biodegradation disqualifies it from most industrial-composting programs. Unfortunately, this disqualification does not stop PLA-straw marketers from publishing phantasma-laced content. "100% Eco-Friendly," "Made from Plant Fiber," and "Biodegradable" are standard fraudulent terms found on the packaging, websites, and Instagram pages of PLA products.
One need not be an expert to identify PLA greenwashing. For example, most PLA straw makers erroneously claim that their product is biodegradable. The best way to confirm this is to determine if the company in question's straws are DIN CERTCO Home & Garden Compostable Certified or BPI Institute Commercially Compostable Certified. To earn these certifications, companies must submit their products to testing agencies. There, the products undergo stringent testing procedures that last over six months.
Thus, earning these certifications is critically important, as companies that have done so have a reputable badge of honor for their product. So, any company possessing one of these certifications with the slightest degree of common sense would feature them on all points of contact with potential customers. In short, companies that have DIN CERTCO's Home & Garden Compostable Certification are authentically eco-friendly.
For PLA to biodegrade, it needs a specialized, non-natural environment. PLA-product sellers might not even know this—they seem fixated on the fact that PLA is made from plant fibers rather than hydrocarbons. But deeming PLA biodegradable certainly counts as greenwashing. Suppose a PLA product doesn't have the proper, highly maintained environment. In that case, it will, like a plastic product, simply sit around in nature for hundreds of years, potentially causing harm to plant and animal life.
Greenwashing Awareness
The purpose of this blog is to compel readers not to accept a company's "green product or green policy choice" at face value. Instead, we want to push consumers to see what parties the company's policy will negatively affect and if there are examples of other policies that are a better solution. An example is the EU's required paperwork for importing plastic bales and Australia's (past) law for plastic bale export. These government policies juxtapose with CMA CGM's scrap plastic ban, which we see as greenwashing.
Consumers must also be aware when confronted with phrases like "biodegradable" and "compostable" printed on the packaging of ostensibly biodegradable products. A highly effective method consumers can use to weed out non-compostable products is this: not purchasing single-use PLA straws or utensils. And, if a product isn't PLA yet claims to be compostable, consumers will know if it legitimately biodegrades because it will have a DIN CERTCO Certification or a BPI Certification.
Greenwashing takes many forms. We hope that the examples we highlighted today make people more aware that while some companies intend to become environmentally friendly, they're harming the environment.
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