You and I are good people, right? We know what’s at stake: the climate, the environment, our health, and the health of our loved ones. So, we make an effort. We buy our take-out lunches in biodegradable packaging. When we buy plastic containers at the grocery store, we put them in the blue bin—even that hard-to-clean peanut butter jar. We load up the rest of our trash into compostable bags, and when the garbage truck comes to cart it all away, we watch from the window, holding a warm cup of coffee made with a “recyclable” pod and having a feel-good moment about our choices. Then we go back to the shops or the drive-through and start the whole cycle all over again.
Well, get ready—because I’m about to crack open that cozy little clamshell package we’ve all been living in, and it’s gonna hurt a bit. If you think the pile of containers in your blue bin is coming back as fresh new products or that those compostable bags and single-use cutlery bits are all out there under a green field somewhere helping to push up flowers, you better think again. The corporate food world has sold us on some beautiful green lies, all designed to keep us comfortably consuming in the ways we’ve grown used to. Now it’s high time to take a hard look at a few of those lies, so we can figure out together if we want to keep telling them back to ourselves.
The green lie: Recycling solves plastic waste.
The truth: Only 5 to 6 percent of plastic waste in the U.S. is recycled. As the Center for Climate Integrity reports, “The majority of plastics cannot be recycled—they never have been and never will be.” And plastics manufacturers have always known it. In fact, they’re the ones who first promoted the idea of recycling, a way to calm public fears when the waste started to pile up and municipalities floated the idea of banning plastic products to save their land, water, and budgets. In other words, they told us, “Don’t worry about the landfills, the chemical leaching, the entangled wildlife! All that plastic will be taken care of! Keep on buying it!”
But it wasn’t taken care of, and it still isn’t. Aside from a wafer-thin share (specifically, plastics types #1 and #2, which make up that 5 to 6 percent), it’s either being burned or it’s collecting in landfills—and in our bodies. It’s also collecting in the ocean so fast that, by weight, there will be more plastic than fish in the water by 2050 if nothing changes.
The green lie: Biodegradable packaging is okay.
The truth: In order to genuinely break down, compostable packaging and bioplastics require conditions that don’t actually exist in our waste system—and that includes coated paper coffee cups and food boxes (yes, even the ones that look brown and “nature-y”). Bioplastics do not break down on their own—they need specialized high-temperature facilities that most cities simply do not have, never mind having enough to handle several million corn-based forks and not-so-compostable coffee pods a day. And that doesn’t even get into problems like cropland being used to produce plant material for bioplastics instead of food, or how the gases they produce when they do actually break down are contributing to all those climate disasters you’ve been reading about (or living through). In short: bioplastics are not our rescue boat—they’re just the same problem hiding under a happy green sticker.
The green lie: “Hey, I’m just one person. A few plastic straws and plastic-lined coffee cups won’t make a difference compared to the waste the rest of the world is creating.”
The truth: Here’s where you’ll expect me to share some shocking stats—say, like the fact that we collectively toss away 16 billion single-use coffee cups in the U.S. annually, or that we go through enough of those turtle-killing straws every year to make two and a half loops around the earth—and leave it at that. But let’s set those aside in favor of a different fact: Yes, you are just one person. But in the corporate world’s eye you are something much more valuable—you are a consumer. Let’s get real: there is only one thing that can drive systemic change in the food world, and that is consumer demand. Your demand. Your shopping habits—a.k.a. your cash dollars—are the only thing that matters to food producers, distributors, and sellers, and it’s only when they see that they can’t manipulate you into buying what they’re selling that they’ll actually change what they’re selling (and how they sell it) into something you can buy with a genuinely clear conscience.
So, until that happens, let’s show them we don’t buy it, metaphorically and literally. It would be great—heck, it would be amazing—if we had national regulation around extended producer responsibility in the U.S., but in the current political climate, I don’t think we should hold our breath. But even if we’re on our own as consumers and as food industry insiders, that doesn’t mean we can’t move the needle. Let’s consume consciously, and focus on the first two words in the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra. Let’s support producers who don’t over-package their products, shop as much as we can in the outer (in other words, fresh) aisles of the grocery store, and choose genuinely reusable options whenever possible. And for my fellow food-world professionals out there, let’s act as if we’re meeting high national regulatory standards for reducing the garbage our products create, even if there are none.
We don’t need perfection, but we do need progress. And in this divided world, it’s more important than ever for those of us who want a sustainable future to fight against the encroach of despair and lean further into the effort of creating the future we want to see for our children and grandchildren. If we can try a little harder to put our hopes into our everyday actions, maybe we can make a difference for the next generation. Now that’s a feel-good moment that’s real.
