There's a really, I think, important parallel between the way that the plastic industry covered up its own information about the kind of lack of viability around plastics recycling and the way that oil and gas companies, which in many cases were actually the producers of plastic, covered up their knowledge that using and burning fossil fuels is contributing to the climate crisis

in a way that can be really, really dangerous, and in fact is really, really dangerous.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks. And this week, my guest is Darnah Neur.

Darnah is the Fossil Fuels and Climate Reporter at The Guardian and recently had an article about the problems with plastic recycling based on a new report that was out showing that basically this thing is not very effective.

It was dreamed up by oil companies and plastic industry lobby groups in order to make

us believe that we could keep consuming all of this plastic in perpetuity,

and it wouldn't have these serious environmental impacts that we're very clearly seeing it have

today. And so I thought this would be an interesting conversation for the podcast,

because while it's not about digital technology, this show covers aspects of technology that go far beyond that.

And when we talk about recycling, when we talk about plastics, when we talk about the notion of

using technology in order to break down these plastics or to figure out other ways to address this

problem, this is something that I think is very much within the remit of this show

to discuss, especially as we're seeing industry, whether it's the tech industry or other

sectors, constantly push tech solutions to the climate crisis and to the environmental

problems that we're having, which seek to tell us that we don't need to really upend the structures of how our

society works, but rather we can address these problems just by introducing some new technologies

and allowing everything else to continue as they are going. And obviously, when it comes to

fossil fuel use and plastic use, that is simply not the case. Just because, you know, we're sold this idea that we can

recycle and then keep using all of these disposable and single-use plastics, that is not actually

the truth. And we have decades to show that this recycling solution is not actually working

because it was only developed in the first place by these industries to get us to keep consuming

...