The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the first ever federal action against a system that misleads consumers about the recycled content in plastic products.showed how the plastics industry uses a controversial accounting method called mass balance to advertise plastic products as 20% or 30% recycled even if they physically contain less than 1% recycled content.
“This is the turning point” that will allow us to start killing the “hoax” of mass balance, said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who founded The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit fighting plastic pollution. A prominent plastics industry trade group defended mass balance and cited its use in other products like paper and fair-trade chocolate. “Mass balance is a widely accepted accounting tool used by a variety of industries that would encourage more recycled content in the overall economy,” Adam Peer, the American Chemistry Council’s senior director of plastics sustainability, said in an email., for instance, included The Clorox Co.