Tuesday, March 31st on WGVU-TV @ 10pm, Plastic Wars reveals that for decades, the plastics industry has helped sell its products by promoting the recyclability of plastic — despite deep doubts inside the industry that widespread plastic recycling would ever be economically viable. “There was never an enthusiastic belief that recycling was ultimately going to work in a significant way,” Lew Freeman, former VP of government affairs for the Society of the Plastics Industry, tells FRONTLINE and NPR in Plastic Wars.
Throughout the documentary, NPR correspondent Laura Sullivan (Trump’s Trade War, Blackout in Puerto Rico, Business of Disaster) speaks with insiders and experts such as Freeman, shedding new light on the plastic industry’s effort to overcome opposition to its products by pushing recycling and promoting the recyclability of many plastics that, to this day, are almost never recycled.