Don’t Take This Plastic Pollution Poll of Likely US Voters at Face Value

Generally speaking, there are two types of polls — those that genuinely want to find out where poll takers stand on given issues or choices and those seeking a pre-ordained outcome. The type of survey you are conducting determines the questions you ask, and how you formulate those questions. A recent poll gauging public opinion on plastic pollution and to what extent producers and the plastics industry writ large should be held accountable made headlines. Here’s one from the Guardian: “Most US voters say plastics industry should be held responsible for recycling claims.” The subhead noted that “even a majority of Republicans support efforts to hold manufacturers accountable for allegedly deceptive claims.”

Surprising consensus

An oasis of consensus in our polarized land is sure to get attention, and it did. But when you know that the survey was conducted by advocacy group Center for Climate Integrity (CCI) and progressive polling firm Data for Progress, well, it’s worth taking a look at how the questions led to this outcome.

To their credit, the organizations are fairly transparent in their methodology, as you can see in the survey questions and results.

As reported by the Guardian, when asked about their level of concern about plastic waste in waterways, 63% of the “likely American voters” polled said they were very concerned, including 73% of Democrats, 60% of independents, and 53% of Republicans. “A majority also indicated some level of worry about plastic litter in their communities, plastic waste in landfills, and microplastics in their bodies,” writes the Guardian.

The survey then noted that some officials have called for litigation against the plastics and fossil fuel industries for deceptive practices and asked those taking the survey if they would back such efforts. 88% of Democrats, 66% of independents, and 54% of Republicans said they would.

What to make of those chasing arrows?

On the chasing arrows symbol, the survey asked several questions about its use on products, prefacing each one with the following statement: “As you may know, the use of the chasing arrows symbol is not regulated, meaning that no agency or group is responsible for protecting the use of the symbol and ensuring it has a clear definition.” Within that set of questions, one stood out to me: It asked poll participants if, knowing the above, they would agree or disagree that it “is deceptive to put this symbol on a plastic product that can ‘technically’ be recycled but is not able to be recycled in practice.” Half of the voters were in strong agreement.

As John Spevacek wrote in a recent column, there is a movement among environmentalists to change the definition of “recyclable.” For a product to be considered recyclable, they say, the infrastructure needed for recycling needs to be in place for a substantial majority of the population. As you can see, this dovetails with the question asked in the survey, which is also quite vague on the meaning of recycling “in practice.” Does that mean the infrastructure is not there but could be if the proper resources were put in place? Or that recyclability depends on a novel technology that has yet to be implemented in a meaningful way? The vagueness of the question, of course, is not a bug but a feature.

Damning quotes from plastics industry documents

Toward the end of the survey, several quotes pulled from internal documents of plastics and fossil fuel industry groups are cited. Taken out of context, they are admittedly quite damning. For example: "...it is more likely that we will wake up and realize that we are not going to recycle our way out of the solid waste issue,” reportedly was said by an Eastman Chemical employee in 1992. After each quote, the poll asks participants how concerned it makes them feel about the state of plastics recycling in the United States today. Is it any surprise that 85% responded that they were “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned?”

Equally telling are the questions that were not asked involving, say, research into advanced recycling technologies, decreasing carbon emissions through vehicle lightweighting, increasing the shelf life of produce and reducing food waste through plastic packaging, and cradle-to-grave comparisons of the environmental footprint of plastics compared with alternative materials. That, of course, would have introduced some nuance and, perhaps, led to some different results.

But that wasn’t the point of this enterprise, was it?