This company claims to help the world’s biggest corporations recycle. Activists say it’s greenwashing.
By Alden Wicker | August 4, 2021 | Vox
Two years ago, Leticia Socal’s cognitive dissonance became too much. She needed to face what her career was doing to the planet.
Socal, who has a PhD in material science, had worked in the plastics industry for 15 years. She quit, started a sustainability blog, and began mentoring startups and students on how to reduce plastic waste. More than one part of her plan involved TerraCycle.
TerraCycle calls itself a “social enterprise Eliminating the Idea of Waste®.” But it might be best understood as the company that will recycle the packaging and products created by large corporations. Specifically, the stuff that you can’t put in your curbside bin. It recycles wrappers for everything from Swedish Fish to Entenmann’s Little Bites, plus a grab bag of other plastic products.
Socal tried signing up for some of the free, brand-specific recycling programs by TerraCycle, but they were full. “There is this huge waitlist. For some of them, I have been waiting for more than one year,” she says.
Socal also bought a $218 TerraCycle box for food wrappers, encouraged her daughters’ schoolmates to fill it with their Halloween candy trash, and sent it in. She never heard more about what happened to it, and couldn’t find much information on TerraCycle’s site.
Then she spoke to the woman who owns her local recycling center. “She was like, ‘I tried to work with them. It’s really hard. They’re not telling you what they are doing with your waste,’” Socal says. The recycling center has searched high and low for a facility that can process wrappers and hasn’t found one.
Unlike a plastic water bottle or milk jug, a typical chip bag or candy wrapper is a very complicated thing, involving different types of laminated plastic. “You have several layers that you need to pull apart,” Socal explains. “This is super labor-intensive. It’s crazy to try.”
Meanwhile, everything Socal’s local recycling center won’t accept has been piling up in her garage while she waits for TerraCycle’s programs to open back up … or for plastic recycling technology to catch up with plastic packaging technology.