AMBR Releases “Chasing Arrows: The Truth About Recycling”

A Short Film Unveiling How Plastics Trash Recycling

The Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers partnered with Emmy Award-winning Peak Plastic Foundation to set the record straight on how petrochemical and packaging industries are overwhelming and overtaxing the recycling system. 

Reduce, reuse, then recycle: In the 1970s, this was the structure under which advocates built America’s recycling industry. Unfortunately, the petrochemical and packaging industries have exploited this fundamental premise and used recycling as a cover to increase plastic production exponentially. 

AMBR’s new short film, “Chasing Arrows: The Truth About Recycling,” outlines how the plastics industry is trashing recycling with non-recyclable plastics. It exposes the recycling myths industry promotes, such as blaming the recycling system and consumers for plastic pollution. The real problem is one they created and are expanding: They are simply making too much plastic, most of which cannot be recycled.

Recycling is not a strategy for making waste “go away.” It was designed to create feedstock for manufacturing new products so that virgin natural resources like trees, minerals, and fossil fuels are left “in the ground” and protected from being extracted and destroyed. A group of mission-based recyclers have banned together to reinforce this original role for recycling and to address myths about recycling by forming the Alliance of MIssion-Based Recyclers. 

The Alliance of Mission-Based Recyclers members understand the original intention of recycling well. They are among the nation’s oldest recyclers who brought recycling to their respective communities to help create health and safety for everyone, stabilize the climate, preserve critical ecosystems, and build resilient regional economies. AMBR models how Zero Waste recycling can and does achieve these goals, and to help return recycling to its roots as an integral part of a circular economy. 

“Chasing Arrows” was produced by Peak Plastic Foundation, an Emmy Award-winning filmmaking collective working toward ending fossil fuels.

Help us share the video:

The truth is: We don’t have a recycling crisis. We have a plastics packaging crisis. Watch Chasing Arrows: The Truth About Recycling, a short film from @AMBRecyclers and @peakplastic: https://youtu.be/BwJuhTGInIE

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