On June 3, the World Wildlife Fund and the American Beverage Association issued a joint memo on the dangers of overproducing and under-recycling plastics, which include contributing sizably to climate change and filling our world with plastic pollution.

It was an odd marriage: WWF is a champion of ecological causes and the ABA represents multibillion-dollar corporations like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. ABA appeared to be telling on itself when it comes to the industrys abundant waste.

The memo endorsed a different kind of recycling policy known as extended producer responsibility, or EPR, which makes corporations responsible for recycling the products they produce, rather than towns and taxpayers. The logic is that it will push companies to design more sustainable products to avoid costs.

Businesses havent exactly lined up to participate in EPR schemes in the past, given that its central idea is making them responsible for all their waste. But thats started to change, says John Hocevar, the oceans campaign director at Greenpeace. With so much concern around plastic pollution, they have, for the most part, realized that they cant just be against everything.

Now the ABA finds itself on the same side of the issue as leading environmental organizations like Greenpeace, Surfrider and the Sierra Club. Its certainly not the typical acrimonious dynamic between big business and environmentalists, exemplified by the Sierra Clubs June 16 announcement that it is suing Coca-Cola for misleading consumers about its recycling practices.

Both the big environmental groups and the ABA seem to agree that EPR is the solution to Americas growing pile of plastic. But other sustainability advocates are convinced that something is off here and that EPRs fans in the business world are just taking advantage of an opportunity to undermine the whole recycling system.

Its ludicrous that the people making the pollution are the ones to solve it, said Maurice Sampson, the eastern Pennsylvania director of Clean Water Action.

Sampson and others think the move toward EPR should be viewed with skepticism, not enthusiasm. We cant blame a rattlesnake for being a rattlesnake, he said. Just remember which end bites.

Upending Our Current Recycling Reality

Recycling in the United States usually works like this: Towns and counties contract with a variety of enterprises that collect, sort and recycle or dump everything their residents toss out.

What isnt recycled and that includes more than 90% of plastics gets sent to a landfill or incinerated. What is recycled isnt always turned into the next generation of goods here in the U.S., either. Until recently, around half of the nations reclaimed plastics were exported, with China the biggest buyer.

The U.S. sent nearly 700,000 tons of used plastics to China in 2016, where cheap labor could be used to sort and recycle the plastic into a host of products to fuel the countrys rapid economic expansion. But as Chinas economy has slowed and its own garbage-producing middle class has grown, the country has tightened its standards and bought far less of the worlds trash, cutting off a huge revenue source for American waste management systems.

In 2018, the price of recycled high-density polyethylene, the type of plastic outdoor furniture is made from, dropped 60% from its 2014 high. Ditto for other types of recyclables. The price of collection, processing and the like became more expensive than market values for recycled materials.

Suddenly, towns went from making tens of thousands of dollars selling their recyclables to paying hundreds of thousands to get it off their hands. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to produce more than 30 million tons of plastic per year without the capacity to handle it.