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Recycling on Everyone’s Radar

Recycling of packaging has been ubiquitous for decades, and yet, its systems have many moving parts, often confuse consumers, and could be more effective at recovering packages.

Eric G

For plastics recycling to work correctly, for example, it helps to have consistency in the use of identifiers for the different polymers, and for consumers to have some level of understanding of those identifiers, and for consistency in labeling claims about recyclability, and for recycling facilities to standardize what they can accept and process. Failure of any one of these can make the whole system less effective.

In a word, recycling in the U.S. is ripe for an overhaul, as indicated by several recent developments, including at least one high-profile lawsuit and important federal legislative proposals.

That lawsuit indirectly raises questions about what’s wrong with recycling in the U.S. It was brought by the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace, which has sued Walmart in California claiming that “the retailer has made false or misleading claims on the labels of many of its products about the recyclability of their packaging.” Despite Walmart’s longtime efforts to make packaging more sustainable and environmentally responsible, Greenpeace makes it out to be a villain, alleging that the retailer’s label claims of “recyclability” are giving consumers bad information.

We’ll see how the case comes out in the end, but in the meantime the interesting question the controversy raises is whether the lack of availability of recycling facilities is Walmart’s fault or the fault of other parties, or is due to a lack of recycling infrastructure.

Directly at issue in the case are the correct way to make label claims about environmental matters. The State of California has adopted the Federal Trade Commission’s Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, which you may be familiar with as the “Green Guides.” These federal guidelines set out parameters by which label claims about various environmental characteristics can be made in a way that isn’t misleading to consumers. A misleading claim would render the product violative of federal consumer protection law.

Specifically, the Guides recite that an unqualified claim that a package or product is “recyclable” should only be made where recycling of that package is available to a “substantial majority” of the population, which FTC says is 60% or more. If it isn’t, you could still make the claim that it’s recyclable, but your claim would need to be qualified by appropriate words or phrases to explain the limitations.

Greenpeace alleges, however, that Walmart “provided no qualifications for some” of the products it claimed were recyclable, and for others it “provided the same two fine print qualifications for each Product: “check locally” and “not recycled in all communities.” Greenpeace claims that “the fine print is approximately 2-point font, making it difficult for consumers to notice, yet alone read. In addition, … a “check locally” disclaimer is per se deceptive under the Green Guides.”


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