LETTERS
MARKETPLACE PROVES REALITY
OF RECYCLING
August 30, 1999
Regarding the July 12 Viewpoint, ``Hope for redemption after NPRC's
failure,'' about National Polystyrene Recycling Co. being bought by
Elm Packaging Co.:
What's wrong with this
Plastics News opinion: ``We hope it also will be the beginning of
a more successful story that will have a solid foundation in economic
reality''?
What's wrong is that the
basic definition of economic reality does not include taking back
contaminated plastics, cleaning them more or less individually and
then reintroducing them back into the raw-material flow, when virgin
materials have none of the significant added investments, headaches
and costs of taking back contaminated plastics and cleaning them
more or less individually.
What's wrong with this
Plastics News opinion: ``It's an embarrassing case in which industry
treated recycling like a cost of doing business, not a real business''?
What's wrong is that recycling
became a cost of doing business because the marketplace -- consumers,
environmentalists and new technologies -- proved that the recycling
of contaminated PS is not a real business, because the marketplace
would not foot the bill.
What's wrong with this
Plastics News opinion: ``Officials made promises about recycling
25 percent of food-service products, and then quietly broke those
promises when they discovered no one was keeping track''?
What's wrong is that companies
stopped wasting money down the recycling rat hole when people finally
came to their senses and stopped wailing and railing to recycle
the entire world's output of everything.
What's right with this
Plastics News opinion: ``It was a case in which an ill-informed
public, egged on by environmentalists and suppliers of competing
materials, insisted that PS was a problem, and that recycling alone
was the answer''?
What's right is the recognition
that misinformation by environmentalists and competitors was behind
the entire debacle, and that neither economic reality, nor environmental
reality, played any role in the process.
What's missing from this
Plastics News opinion: ``We hope that ... having a single, dedicated
owner will be more effective than having a committee of owners with
the cash, but without the commitment, to make NPRC truly successful''?
What's missing is Plastics
News' own commitment of more than mere lip service. If this venture
is really such a wonderful opportunity based on ``a solid foundation
in economic reality,'' how about Plastics News giving it more than
mere words?
How about, for once, Plastics
News putting its money where its mouth has been for the last decade
about plastics recycling? Wouldn't that finally give the plastics
industry -- and Plastics News -- a ``real taste of the free-enterprise
system''?
George A. Makrauer
ComAd Management Group
Inc.
Treasure Island, Fla.
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