Dear Friend of Maine's environment,

Tomorrow is America Recycles Day—what amounts to a fake holiday created by Keep America Beautiful, a group funded by corporations like McDonalds, Pepsi, and Dow Chemical. This holiday is actually propaganda designed to blame you and your neighbors for the plastic waste choking our oceans and an underperforming recycling system. These corporations have one goal: to make you forget that they’re the ones who are causing these problems. 

Blaming individuals is one of the oldest tricks in the corporate playbook. But here in Maine, and across the nation, people are beginning to stand up to polluting corporations by holding them accountable for the damage they’re doing. 

We all want to do the right thing for the environment by recycling, but the actions of selfish corporations are making things worse by prioritizing profit over the health of our environment. These corporations are: 

• contributing to climate change by increasing production of fossil fuels to make more non-recyclable plastics; 

• mislabeling their packages with incorrect recycling information; 

• mixing materials in ways that make them impossible to recycle; 

• actively lobbying against laws that would make our recycling systems better; and 

• engaged in a disinformation campaign to confuse you about the environmental impact of plastic. 

Mainers are saying “Enough is enough!” by holding corporations accountable for the damage they’re doing to Maine’s environment and making these polluters pay. Many local and community-minded Maine businesses supported Maine’s transformative Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging law, and proved that corporations don’t have to act this way. We’ll be tracking implementation of this new law to make sure corporate lobbyists don’t water it down. 

This year for America Recycles Day, we are familiarizing ourselves with the corporate disinformation playbook. We must learn to recognize corporate tricks as we fight to save our oceans and climate from fossil fuel and plastic industries.  

After that, we’re re-watching The Story of Plastic, now available to watch for free. This documentary shows how the plastic industry is using disinformation to pass off its responsibility for the plastic pollution crisis. 

And if you haven’t already, please sign our petition calling on big waste companies to stop using Maine’s Juniper Ridge landfill as a dumping ground for out-of-state waste. 

Once you know the tricks in the corporate playbook, it’s easy to spot them—even predict them. The more we know about these tricks, the better we can protect ourselves and Maine’s environment. 

Sarah Nichols
NRCM Sustainable Maine Director