After publication, Joshua Baca, vice president of plastics for the group, sent an email to NPR calling Greenpeace's views "misleading, out of touch and misguided." The American Chemistry Council, an industry lobby group, initially did not respond to NPR's request for comment on the Greenpeace report. Investigations California is investigating Big Oil for allegedly misleading the public on recycling That message has been difficult for the public to absorb with so many different bins in public spaces, and their own communities telling them to put their plastic in recycling containers. It's going to a recycling facility and being landfilled someplace else because can't do anything with that material." "It's not going to a recycling facility and being recycled. "We had to re-educate individuals that a great deal of that material is ending up in a landfill," Carpenter said. They wanted to put their strawberry containers, bags, yogurt cups and all manner of plastic trash in their recycling bin. Trent Carpenter, the general manager of Southern Oregon Sanitation, says when they told customers a couple years ago that they could no longer take any plastic trash other than soda bottles and jugs - like milk containers and detergent bottles - people were upset. The result is that plastic trash has few markets - a reality the public has not wanted to hear. New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to produce. Greenpeace found the more plastic is reused the more toxic it becomes. Plastic also degrades after one or two uses. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together. Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. "The crisis just gets worse and worse, and without drastic change will continue to worsen as the industry plans to triple plastic production by 2050." "More plastic is being produced, and an even smaller percentage of it is being recycled," says Lisa Ramsden, senior plastic campaigner for Greenpeace USA. Plastic must have a recycling rate of 30% to reach that standard no plastic has ever been recycled and reused close to that rate. Greenpeace found that no plastic - not even soda bottles, one of the most prolific items thrown into recycling bins - meets the threshold to be called "recyclable" according to standards set by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation New Plastic Economy Initiative. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced. The report cites separate data published this May which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S. Unwanted used plastic sits outside Garten Services, a recycling facility in Oregon.
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