America Recycles Day was established in 1997 by the National Recycling Coalition to encourage sorting used plastics, papers, aluminum and other materials into municipal recycling containers where available.
And while the intention behind recycling is good—to keep more materials out of the landfill and give them a second life—the reality is much more complicated, according to eco-friendly online shop Grove Collaborative.
This year, Grove’s using the day of recycling to highlight what doesn’t work in our recycling systems. The effort homes in on why these messy, imperfect processes illustrate the need for the consumer packaged goods industry to move away from plastics. Two 30-second ads are running today on linear and streaming TV.
An unfair tradeoff
“The CPG industry has really been built on the back of seemingly disposable, single-use plastic,” Danielle Jezienicki, director of sustainability for Grove Collaborative, told Adweek.
“We can’t continue to burden our consumers with packaging that’s going to last for 500,000 years because they want clean hair,” she explained.
Grove Collaborative | America Recycles Day 1
Roughly 76 million pounds of plastic is created each day in the U.S. Beyond that, around 321 billion pounds of plastic packaging is manufactured globally each year. It’s almost impossible to grasp immensity of that waste. But if you can imagine the weight of about 800,000 Boeing 747s, that’s what the annual worldwide output of plastic packaging amounts to.
As as practical matter, that plastic largely makes its way into landfills and into the ocean, often breaking down into microplastics and finding its way into the food we eat. But the responsibility for solving the issue is rarely placed on plastics producers. Instead, curtailing environmental damage has often been thrust onto the consumer—an often unintended consequence of educational campaigns like America Recycles Day.
Recycling itself is a complicated process. Only 9% of the plastic that Americans do throw into the blue bin even gets recycled. In part, that’s because of contamination or lack of appropriate systems. But it’s also a result of decades of PR campaigns and corporate lobbying by plastic producers and CPG brands. Thanks to efforts that began in the 1970s, even hard-to-recycle plastics are stamped with a recycling symbol.
Grove Collaborative | America Recycles Day 2
Grove Collaborative, which was launched in 2016 as a certified B corporation, is working to find ways to get household products into the hands of consumers without relying on single-use plastics—or any plastics at all.
By 2025, it’s aiming to be completely plastic-free. Until it’s found solutions for every product, Grove is working with rePurpose Global to offset its plastic footprint by funding programs that clean up plastic in nature. (Grove’s also planning to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030.)
The company recently launched a new line of plastic-free personal care products called Peach Not Plastic. The product line offers products like face soap, exfoliating body wash, deodorant, shampoo and conditioner in bars or tubes that swap paper or aluminum for the traditional plastic package. Grove is also working with a group of more than 70 third-party brands within its Plastic Working Group to create solutions for other more complicated products like cosmetics.
“There’s no shortage of challenges, to be clear,” Jezienicki said. “We really need the engine of innovation across our industry.”
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