In the interests of balance, I spent some time reading a site that was created for the Plastics Division of the American Chemistry Council. The tagline for plasticsinfo.org is Better Living With Plastics.
The site paints an overly rosey picture of how recycling works. They use, with permission, a piece of fluff journalism from the Christian Science Monitor. The reality of the recycling industry is not all about making soda bottles into mittens. When I was researching the impact of yogurt containers and possible alternatives I found a page published by an environmentally conscious company that found out that their recyclable containers were being diverted to a landfill because they had a different melting temperature than other containers in the same recycling stream. They made the difficult decision to go with a non-recyclable container that contained less plastic and required less energy when it was produced.
