Two years ago, Leticia Socal’s cognitive dissonance became too much. She needed to face what her career was doing to the planet.

Socal, who has a PhD in material science, had worked in the plastics industry for 15 years. She quit, started a sustainability blog, and began mentoring startups and students on how to reduce plastic waste. More than one part of her plan involved TerraCycle.

TerraCycle calls itself a “social enterprise Eliminating the Idea of Waste®.” But it might be best understood as the company that will recycle the packaging and products created by large corporations. Specifically, the stuff that you can’t put in your curbside bin. It recycles wrappers for everything from Swedish Fish to Entenmann’s Little Bites, plus a grab bag of other plastic products. 

Socal tried signing up for some of the free, brand-specific recycling programs by TerraCycle, but they were full. “There is this huge waitlist. For some of them, I have been waiting for more than one year,” she says. 

Socal also bought a $218 TerraCycle box for food wrappers, encouraged her daughters’ schoolmates to fill it with their Halloween candy trash, and sent it in. She never heard more about what happened to it, and couldn’t find much information on TerraCycle’s site. 

Then she spoke to the woman who owns her local recycling center. “She was like, ‘I tried to work with them. It’s really hard. They’re not telling you what they are doing with your waste,’” Socal says. The recycling center has searched high and low for a facility that can process wrappers and hasn’t found one. 

Unlike a plastic water bottle or milk jug, a typical chip bag or candy wrapper is a very complicated thing, involving different types of laminated plastic. “You have several layers that you need to pull apart,” Socal explains. “This is super labor-intensive. It’s crazy to try.” 

Meanwhile, everything Socal’s local recycling center won’t accept has been piling up in her garage while she waits for TerraCycle’s programs to open back up … or for plastic recycling technology to catch up with plastic packaging technology. 

A new lawsuit filed against TerraCycle in March 2020 alleges that it and its biggest corporate partners — including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Late July Snacks, Gerber, L’Oreal, Tom’s of Maine, and Clorox — are not telling the whole truth when they say their packaging is recyclable. It says the recycling programs are not accessible or transparent, and the vast majority of packaging still winds up in the landfill or ocean despite conscious consumers’ best efforts. TerraCycle helps these conglomerates “reap the rewards of portraying their products as recyclable while offering no corresponding benefit to the environment or to consumers concerned about sustainability,” according to the suit. The suit also says that TerraCycle has provided no hard proof that it is recycling what it says it is. (The brands named in the suit declined to comment, citing pending litigation, except Gerber, which said it “stands behind all of our claims around recyclability.”)

Environmental advocates believe TerraCycle’s core business is actually just providing greenwashing services to corporations that want to look like they are doing something about plastic waste. In fact, they believe these corporations are making and selling ever more disposable plastic products — and then making it your problem instead of theirs. 

TerraCycle will take your old cigarette butts. It will take your used Barilla Ready Pasta packets. It’ll take your Bausch + Lomb contact lens cases, beer-scented Solo cups, and L.O.L. Surprise! doll accessories. 

It says that it can recycle them all, and it will do it for free.   

TerraCycle claims to make the unrecyclable recyclable, and businesses (and consumers) love the company for it. It was included in Time’s 2021 list of the world’s 100 most influential companies. During the pandemic, the boxes it sells to consumers saw double-digit sales growth.

TerraCycle’s Hungarian-born founder Tom Szaky looks like your typical hippie entrepreneur, with shaggy brown hair and a beard. We spoke over Zoom, him beaming in from a large office space lined with curtains made of empty plastic water bottles. He founded TerraCycle in 2001 while a first-year student at Princeton. At first, he collected food waste and sold the compost to local businesses. Later he pivoted to processing packaging, and in 2007 got his first brand partners — Honest Tea, Stonyfield Farm, and Clif Bar — which paid TerraCycle to set up collection points for their packaging. Since then, TerraCycle has expanded globally and has partnered with more than 500 brands for all sorts of stuff, including Teva for its sandals and both Hasbro and Mattel for their toys. 

The business world is ready for a solution to plastic waste. With factoids like “By 2050, our oceans will have more plastic than fish,” videos of marine life being strangled, and news stories about dead whales full of plastic zinging around the internet, companies have been under increasing pressure from consumers and governments to do something about the global plastic pollution problem. 

Szaky’s pitch is that our recycling system is broken. Because it’s increasingly labor intensive to recycle our complicated modern packaging, and because China stopped accepting most waste from the US in 2018, it has become less and less profitable to collect and recycle disposable products. Many municipalities are finding they can’t afford to do anything but throw it all in the landfill or incinerate it. 

Szaky’s solution is to get corporations and consumers to pay for it. 

Here’s how it works: Once corporations partner with TerraCycle and pay a fee (the cost of which neither TerraCycle nor its partners have revealed), they can tell consumers on their websites and on their packaging that it is recyclable through TerraCycle. Consumers, schools, and businesses are encouraged to sign up for each free recycling program separately at TerraCycle’s website. For each program they are approved for, they receive a shipping label or collection container. They fill it with the specified waste from the sponsoring brand and send it in for recycling. Some brands send a few cents per item to charity as an incentive. 

TerraCycle then pays plastic manufacturers in the US to recycle these products. Szaky says the wrappers, for example, are melted down and extruded into a copolymer that TerraCycle then sells to American manufacturers of products like garbage cans, Frisbees, benches, and shipping pallets — bulky things that don’t need precision-molded, high-quality virgin plastic. (Though many would consider this downcycling, not recycling.) It was in the negative by $1.1 million in 2020 on this part of its business.

Participating in a TerraCycle recycling program is not that easy, though. To recycle your used Honest Kids drink pouches or K-Y Jelly tubes for free, you have to either find a local drop-off site (which might be too far away) or sign up to receive mailing materials at TerraCycle’s website (an option that often involves a months-long waitlist). 

If you can get a shipping label, you then need to save up, clean, and separate your spent packaging and take it to UPS to be shipped off to the company’s warehouse in New Jersey. TerraCycle encourages you to wait until you have a certain weight of trash to send off, to keep the emissions of shipping down. So, you need to either go through a lot of K-Y Jelly, for example, or find other people passionate enough about plastic waste to save their tubes and give them all to you. 

Szaky defends TerraCycle’s limits by saying that it gives access to recycling to all consumers who want to recycle items and make the effort to do so. But for some programs, like Gillette razor blades, there aren’t even public drop-off locations in Brooklyn, one of the most dense (and self-consciously sustainable) areas in the US — everything is registered at apartment addresses. Szaky says the lack of locations is because Gillette’s program is only a year old and that not enough people have signed up to set up collection points yet. But that again puts the onus on consumers instead of Gillette to set up and run collection points on their own time. Gillette’s program is really only “free” if you consider everyone’s time and labor worthless. 

If TerraCycle’s free, corporate-sponsored program isn’t available for a given product, TerraCycle will sell you a container that you can fill according to the box’s theme — toys, hair salon waste, and kitchen waste are a few of the dozens of categories — and ship to TerraCycle. If you want to keep going, you then need to buy another box. These boxes are not cheap. The bestselling small all-in-one box, which will take pretty much anything and measures 11 x 11 x 20 inches, costs $199 — prohibitively expensive for all but the most privileged and committed consumers. 

And yet, consumer boxes count for a not-insignificant part of TerraCycle’s revenue. In 2020, according to TerraCycle’s financial filing in preparation for a potential IPO, its US division generated $25 million in net sales, $7.5 million of which came from its boxes. $10.5 million came from the more than 45 partnering brands listed on TerraCycle’s site, which means each company is spending what amounts to less than a rounding error of their operations. 

TerraCycle has a similarly itsy-bitsy recycling volume. Szaky told Vox that TerraCycle, on average, collects 217 tons of waste per month through its mail-in program from the entire continental United States. The small town of Mamaroneck, New York, recycles more than that in a year. New York City alone produces 12,000 tons of waste per day.

Even for specific categories, the waste collected is so vanishingly small as to be almost negligible. Szaky says TerraCycle has recycled 370,000 Bic pens this year. That’s a big number, but it amounts to recycling just 0.02 percent of the estimated 1.6 billion ballpoint pens thrown out in the US every year. Two-hundredths of a percent is not technically nothing. But it is close. 

This minuscule investment by corporations seems to be more of a marketing ploy than pointing to an actual shift in their operations. In other words, corporations seem to be paying TerraCycle to help them greenwash, whether Szaky knows it or not. A 2020 report by the Changing Markets Foundation claimed the largest conglomerates in the world, including Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Colgate-Palmolive, make voluntary pledges and support small take-back schemes as a tactic to take the air out of anti-plastic movements.

TerraCycle is frequently mentioned in the report as the tool corporations use to make it look like they’re moving toward reusable and recyclable containers, while at the same time they aggressively lobby against anti-plastic legislation. For example, the report says Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Tetra Pak spent between €300,000 and €1.2 million in 2018 lobbying against the European Union’s Single-Use Plastic Directive. (This lobbying effort failed; the SUP Directive became EU law just a few weeks ago.) 

Szaky has aligned himself with the interests of these big businesses. “It’s much better to focus on and empathize with their goals — whether you agree with them or not, frankly,” Szaky said in an interview this past May. “Even if it’s as uninspired as ‘I want to sell more stuff.’” 

He also has said that, because companies pay for TerraCycle’s recycling programs, they are “even more motivated” to improve the design so they can cut the cost of TerraCycle’s recycling program, and that TerraCycle often provides consulting services to brands that want to make their packaging more frequently recyclable. Gerber, with the help of TerraCycle’s feedback, made its squeeze pouches easier and less expensive for TerraCycle to process. These squeeze packs are not yet, however, curbside recyclable. 

The question remains: If corporations can set a low cut-off point for how much they will pay for each recycling program (the largest programs are in the seven figures, which is hilariously small for a global behemoth like Nestlé, which made $13.49 billion in profit in 2020, how are they incentivized to do anything more than the bare minimum? 

TerraCycle’s own employees have trouble with this business model. “Most people joining our company have to be trained … because people are so mission-driven,” Szaky has said. “It’s almost like, ‘F**k you, you should be responsible’ — that emotion comes out.” 

Environmental advocates are fed up. “I am a very dedicated recycler. I have never mailed TerraCycle anything. And I don’t plan to,” says Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics at Bennington College in Vermont and former EPA regional administrator under Obama. “On one hand, I want to say it’s well intentioned. But on the other hand, I think it gives excuses for large corporations to keep using plastics.” 

Let’s zoom out from the small impact of TerraCycle’s recycling programs and look at the question of whether recycling should even be the goal here. 

“Pretty much anything is technically recyclable if you throw enough money, hours, and energy at it,” says John Hocevar, Greenpeace USA’s oceans campaign director. He has been working with corporations to get them to phase out single-use plastics, and increasingly sees them turn to TerraCycle instead. “That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea or that it makes sense from an economic or environmental perspective.” 

A chemical engineer with more than 35 years of experience, Jan Dell has sat on the US Federal Climate Committee and consulted for companies like Nike, Gap, and Mattel on supply chain projects around water and labor. For those issues, she says corporations had been willing to make real and beneficial changes. But when she tried to talk to them about plastic waste, “they’d say recycling is the solution,” she says. “And I’d be like, no, that’s not possible. As a chemical engineer, I know. It defies the second law of thermodynamics. It’s greenwashing.” 

Plastic degrades every time you process it into another plastic product; it can’t be recycled back through the system endlessly. It’s always downcycled, or turned into a material that is less valuable, until that too ends up in the landfill. Or, it’s incinerated, which can pollute local communities with toxic emissions and release greenhouse gases. Some chemical companies are promoting a new type of recycling called chemical recycling, where plastic is broken down into its chemical components to be used as energy or reformed into new plastic, but environmental groups say this process is just as polluting and energy-intensive, if it is even scalable. 

For now, new plastic always has to be made, and old plastic will always end up in the environment. The only way to reduce the amount of plastic going into the oceans is to make less of it. Way less of it. But the opposite is happening. Oil companies, seeing the writing on the wall for cars, are moving into plastics. 

Three years ago, the company Dell worked for acquired another that specialized in building plastic manufacturing plants, and she was told her job, formerly focused on clean energy, was going to expand to include helping ExxonMobil build new polyethylene cracker plants. So she quit and founded a small nonprofit in California called The Last Beach Cleanup. Her goal was to stop plastic pollution. 

“To do that,” she says, “I had to expose that plastic recycling doesn’t work.” 

She started looking at the issue of what qualifies as “recyclable.” The Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guide says that to put an unqualified “recyclable” label on something, at least 60 percent of people in locations where it is sold need to have access to a place to recycle it. If not, the manufacturer has to clearly emphasize to consumers the limited availability of recycling. 

Dell partnered with Greenpeace to survey all of the country’s 367 materials recovery facilities (MRFs) that sort incoming waste to see what they accept. The study found that in the US, only #1 plastic (clear PET bottles) and #2 plastic (high-density polyethylene milk and detergent jugs) are reliably recycled. The rest of the plastic is landfilled or burned, or shipped abroad to less-developed countries, where it is also piled in landfills or burned. 

Take polypropylene (labeled as #5 and used in things like yogurt containers and coffee lids). There are only enough facilities in the US to process 5 percent of what is sold, yet polypropylene products are sold in California with a recycling symbol on them. The closest facility that can recycle these products is in Alabama, 2,000 miles away. 

Because of the industry’s expansive use of the chasing arrows symbol, as well as peppy recycling marketing campaigns, confused consumers now throw any and all plastic in their recycling bins. A 2020 report showed that some communities on the West Coast have plastics contamination rates of up to 46 percent. When recyclable plastic is contaminated by unrecyclable plastic, MRFs often have to throw the whole batch away. Only 30 percent of the most recyclable type of plastic, PET water bottles, are ultimately recycled (and are now the subject of a lawsuit from Sierra Club over the “recyclable” label). 

“It’s going to take laws and lawsuits to actually fix this because unfortunately, the FTC hasn’t ever enforced the Green Guides,” Dell says. 

While she was working on that project, Dell noticed TerraCycle labels popping up on store shelves, and she saw that the company claimed that it recycles 97 percent of the qualified materials sent in to them. She found that claim absurd. 

Dell tried to sign up for the Late July chip bag program (a company owned by Campbell’s), but it was closed to new participants, as were more than a dozen other corporate-sponsored recycling programs managed by TerraCycle.  

Szaky confirmed that the companies that partner with TerraCycle put a cap on the amount of money they are willing to spend on recycling. When enough people or locations sign up, the new participants are put on the waiting list until the brands decide whether or not they want to allocate more money. 

If she didn’t want to wait for the free program, Dell had the option of buying an $86 11 x 11 x 20-inch snack waste box from TerraCycle for her used chip bags. Dell filled a small box the size of the TerraCycle box with plastic packaging, and the contents weighed 3.5 pounds. That means its customers are paying more than $24 per pound ($48,000 per ton) to recycle food packaging waste. Recycling household waste costs the government up to $278 per ton, or just under 28 cents per pound. It’s a bum deal (even with the 10 percent discount TerraCycle sent out last month in honor of Amazon Prime Day). 

Dell waited nine months for the Late July program to open back up. “The FTC guidelines are all based on a ‘reasonable’ test. It’s not reasonable to expect that people are going to keep plastic trash all separated in their garage or whatever,” Dell says. 

The participation limits were the smoking gun Dell needed to go after TerraCycle. If TerraCycle and corporations are saying their packaging and products are recyclable through a free program in order to incentivize consumers to buy their stuff, but in practice only allow a few thousand (according to the location counters on TerraCycle’s website) to participate in their high-effort programs before encouraging them to plunk down their own cash, in her view, the label “recyclable through TerraCycle” is a lie. 

Luckily, Dell lives in California, where organizations can file “organizational harm” lawsuits. “Here I am, putting energy and resources into trying to fix these labels, spending my own money, instead of working on other stuff. And this group over there is doing the opposite, harming my efforts to be an environmental NGO,” she explains. California consumers can also ask for proof that a company is actually recycling what they say they are. 

In December, the public interest firm Lexington Law sent a letter to TerraCycle on behalf of The Last Beach Cleanup asking for receipts proving they were recycling. Szaky says that TerraCycle does recycle everything sent in that is qualified, minus a few percentage points for the little bits of labels and similar stuff burned away in recycling. The only thing TerraCycle incinerates, he claims, are noncompliant materials that people send in that they can’t find a way to recycle. He said they are updating the website to provide more information on how things are recycled. 

He has not, however, provided documentation. To several of Vox’s questions concerning overall numbers — like how much of each kind of material TerraCycle receives and processes, or what the average waitlist time is — he said that the data exists, but his team hasn’t calculated those numbers. 

Unsatisfied with TerraCycle’s response, the law firm filed the lawsuit in March in California. It seeks to force TerraCycle and its partners to stop using the TerraCycle recyclable symbol on products that it hasn’t proven are easily recyclable by at least 60 percent of consumers. If successful, the lawsuit could render the more profitable half of TerraCycle’s business model — getting paid by corporations to tell consumers that they can recycle pretty much anything — a fineable offense. That would leave only the part where TerraCycle charges consumers an exorbitant amount of money to process packaging that corporations created and sold to them. 

There was no press release, and the suit got little press coverage. Dell says she’s not doing it for publicity or money. “My greater goal is really to help companies truly make their products reusable, recyclable, and compostable,” she says. “The brands themselves know they could make simple changes to improve design.” 

Colgate, for one, has started switching all its tubes to curbside-recyclable #2 HDPE and is open-sourcing its packaging technology with other companies. But the overall trend has gone in the opposite direction. Where we used to buy simple glass and metal containers, now we get mixed plastic-and-paper Tetra Pak cartons, squeezy tubes and drink pouches, beer cans shrink-wrapped in plastic labels, single-use sachets, and coffee cans topped with plastic. 

Not long after the lawsuit was filed, around Earth Day this year, Taco Bell announced it was partnering with TerraCycle to recycle all its used hot sauce packets. Dell calculated that if 6.6 billion (60 percent) of Taco Bell’s hot sauce packets were sent to TerraCycle, it would produce 104,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, roughly equal to the annual carbon emissions of 23,000 cars. Of course, the idea of that many Taco Bell customers saving and sending back hot sauce packets boggles the mind. “It just is non-viable,” she says. “It’s not serious.”

Szaky sent Vox a lifecycle analysis that showed that TerraCycle’s collection and recycling of multilayer wrappers have a lower carbon footprint than landfilling them and manufacturing new wrappers from virgin plastic. (Though, experts say that lifecycle analyses have been manipulated by corporations and the plastics industry to make plastic look more sustainable than it really is.) 

Greenpeace’s Hocevar put out a press release asking why Taco Bell doesn’t just allow customers to specify they want hot sauce on their tacos or have bulk hot sauce pumps available. “These companies are looking for ways to make it appear that they are doing something about plastic without taking the actions that are really needed to address this,” he says. “You can’t keep making and handing out billions of hot sauce packets and convince people that it’s okay.”

In a statement emailed to Vox, Taco Bell said, “Taco Bell is still collaborating with TerraCycle to determine collection mechanics, which will initially roll out as a pilot program. Taco Bell’s upcoming partnership with TerraCycle is an important step, but not the final step, in identifying viable solutions quickly and efficiently.”

If TerraCycle isn’t the solution, what is? 

“I’m a strong supporter of deposits,” Beyond Plastics’ Enck says. Container deposit laws tack on a fee of a few cents on each bottle or can. If you bring the empty container to a collection point, you get that fee back. Deposits are pretty much the opposite of those pricey TerraCycle boxes, because corporations have to administer and pay for the collection points. And then consumers get paid when they turn bottles and cans back in. (In the states that have deposit laws, collecting these containers is the way some low-income people make ends meet.) More importantly, deposit legislation is effective — states with bottle bills have the highest recycling rates in the country. 

But brands, unsurprisingly, hate deposits.

Szaky says it costs 4 cents to recycle each Gerber squeeze pouch, so why not just do a deposit system of 4 cents per pack? 

“Many people, big NGOs, organizations have been trying that and failed, so no, I couldn’t just do that,” he said. “That’s an absurd idea. I’m not the president of the country. Could you just go pass a bottle bill right now?”

I started to explain that Maine had just passed an expanded deposit bill, but he cut me off. 

“What state are you in right now?”

I tell him New York. 

“Okay, go pass a deposit law on pens tomorrow. Why don’t you just do that?” (We had been discussing those Bic pens.) 

I ask him if he’s suggesting that the only thing I can do as a US citizen to address plastic pollution is to buy a TerraCycle-labeled product. 

“No, no, I didn’t say that. Sorry. Not at all. I think, as a citizen, you should first buy less stuff. If you do choose to buy things that have been designed into local recyclability, you’re not benefiting me at all. I think those are way better answers. Then buy a reusable pen. Still has nothing to do with me.” (Side note: Zebra’s 100 percent metal refillable pen comes packaged in plastic.) “Then, if you have a voice and you’re willing to go do it, knock on your lawmaker’s door and ask them to pass taxes and all sorts of legislation to do exactly what you described.”

As Szaky correctly pointed out, until last week, the United States was one of the only developed countries without an Extended Producer Responsibility law. Maine just passed America’s first EPR law last week, which will impose fees on consumer product companies based on the cost of collecting and recycling their products and packaging. (The industry group Ameripen, which counts Nestlé, Campbell’s, PepsiCo, and Tetra Pak among its members, came out against it, saying it gives the government too much authority.) Oregon is considering similar legislation. 

TerraCycle’s claims that they can and do recycle almost anything could stymie these efforts to rein in packaging. New York City’s 2015 ban on polystyrene products was delayed for four years because a judge accepted the chemical industry’s promise that it would create a viable recycling system for polystyrene. It was only when a team of experts produced a report showing that there was close to no polystyrene recycling in all of the US that a second judge let the ban go forward in 2019.

“I’m not aware of any case where a company has used us to do such a form of lobbying,” Szaky said in response. “When we are asked or have the opportunity, we always say that EPR legislation is a wonderful thing, and deposit laws are a wonderful thing.”

When asked why he would support legislation that would undercut his business, especially when he has been considering an IPO, he said, “There are many investors who rally behind that, who say, ‘Hey, here’s an investment. We really hope you achieve your mission. And if we make some money, great, and if we don’t, and the mission was achieved, that’s awesome.’” 

“I wish we didn’t have to exist,” he went on. “I have a friend who runs a great nonprofit that focuses on battered women in Mexico. Do you think he wants to be in business?”

“Don’t you ever worry you’re being used?” I asked him. 

“Yeah, I absolutely think about that,” he says. “And then I’m thinking, they could spend a bunch of money on TV commercials that made you love their products. And if they’re going to use me to do the same effect as a commercial, I think it’s still better for the planet. And that’s fine.” 

It’s clear that Szaky believes TerraCycle is helping, in a small way, address global plastic pollution. But his belief that corporations will fulfill their pledges to go plastic-free feels like a holdover from the 2010s, when entrepreneurs thought they could do an end run around the government and disrupt their way into environmental responsibility. 

It would be better, however, if he wasn’t having consumers pay for this delusion. 

When I first received Rickey Ruff’s email, I was flummoxed. “We are deploying Micro Nuclear Reactors at clothing factories around the world to displace oil, coal, and gas, bringing fashion production to net-zero carbon emissions,” his pitch read. 

That’s right, a man named Rickey Ruff wants to outfit every single one of the what he describes as more than 8,000 fashion suppliers worldwide — chemical manufacturers, dye houses, garment factories — with their own personal, miniature nuclear reactor. (According to the Open Apparel Registry, there are more than 55,000 known fashion suppliers worldwide.)

On its face, this seems like a terrible idea. Every week there seems to be another deadly fire, flood, or collapse in a garment factory (or a building illegally housing one). Myanmar’s garment factories are currently being smashed and set on fire by citizens rebelling against the military coup. If garment factories can’t even keep their boilers from exploding, why would we trust them with a nuclear reactor? 

I wasn’t alone in this assessment. “If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger, right?” says Gary Cook, global climate campaigns director at the advocacy group Stand.earth. 

These micronuclear reactors aren’t even here yet. Several startups and companies are promising they’ll have an operational microreactor by the end of this decade, and the Pentagon has asked two companies to submit designs for what they’re calling portable nuclear power plants, which could be quickly installed at remote army locations. That’s not necessarily a recommendation. The Army has a very recent history of spending billions of its seemingly limitless budget on technology that it’s never actually used. 

But after the president of Apparel Impact Institute (AII), Lewis Perkins, had a laugh with me, he got serious. “The concept is certainly in the ballpark of where we need to be,” he says. “Without disruptive innovation, the industry is not going to meet their science-based targets by 2030.” 

The thing is, the fashion industry does far more toxic and dangerous things every single day than run a small nuclear reactor. I couldn’t get Ruff’s idea out of my head, as strange as it seemed at first. So yeah, I’ll bite. What is “micronuclear?” Who is Rickey Ruff? And is this idea … feasible? 

Pollute now, apologize later

The fashion industry is well aware that it needs to overhaul its operations. It’s estimated to be responsible for around 5 percent of global carbon emissions, and the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which includes Reformation, H&M, Zara, Patagonia, Levi’s, Walmart, and Boohoo, has set for its members a target of 45 percent emissions reductions by 2030. 

Exactly how they will achieve this is remarkably fuzzy. While fashion brands have made a big deal about purchasing wind power for their corporate headquarters and swapping lightbulbs in their stores, upward of 90 percent of total emissions for most brands and retailers come from so-called Scope 3 emissions, and roughly 80 percent of these emissions come from the supply chain where apparel and footwear are made, according to a soon-to-be-published report co-authored by AII, which identifies and scales decarbonization projects in the fashion industry, and World Resources Institute (WRI). 

Almost all fashion suppliers are located in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, and Turkey, which are powered by coal, and research by Stand.earth shows a dramatic increase in the number of new coal power plants planned in these countries. Renewable energy is getting cheaper all the time, but it has some serious limitations, one being space. Arvind Limited, a large Indian textile manufacturer, has covered all its available roof space with solar panels. At 16.2 megawatts, it’s the largest industrial solar plant in India, yet maxes out at only 14 percent of Arvind’s electricity needs. 

Textile fabrication and coloration are particularly energy and emissions-intensive. Dye houses and laundries need thermal energy to run their boilers. “You have to burn something in order to get the water temperature hot enough to do its job,” says Perkins. “Solar will not do it. Geothermal will not do it.” That “something” is usually cheap, abundant coal or, when it’s available, natural gas, which is only slightly better. “The alternative sometimes is to burn forests,” Perkins says. 

Biomass, or plant-based agricultural waste, could be one solution, and Perkins says AII is looking into running a pilot in Vietnam using rice husks. But according to Abhishek Bansal, head of sustainability at Arvind, a boiler can only incorporate up to 30 percent biomass. It’s also not emissions-free, just low-emissions compared to coal. Plus, as an agricultural product, it’s only seasonally available, and there are concerns that there could be unintended consequences, similar to what biofuel did to global food prices. Arvind is also trying new waterless indigo dying technology for some of its denim. If that could be applied to all of its textiles, that could potentially reduce boiler use by half. Potentially.

There’s now solar thermal energy coming to market that could boil water, but it’s expensive. “To get rid of coal at our facility, we have to look at the order of magnitude of a $100 million investment,” Bansal says. (For context, Arvind’s reported annual revenue in March 2020 was about $900 million.) 

So, is there any brand that will hit its emissions reduction target? “It’s really hard to tell, because you don’t see too many companies clearly disclose how they’re doing against their targets,” says Michael Sadowski, a fashion and climate research consultant to WRI. “If I had to guess, I would say no one is on track for Scope 3 targets. And, you know, because these brands have so many suppliers … yeah.” He sighs. “It’s not easy to decarbonize.”

The call to greatness

The website for Global Nuclear Concepts, as Ruff’s venture is called, has an epic video of him on the top of a mountain gazing into the distance. It also solicits financial contributions to the cause, which he markets as carbon offsets. But it’s short on details. 

So I emailed him back and asked for an interview. He called in from Colorado, where he grew up and where he’s been remotely working during the pandemic. He wore a collared sweatshirt with a stylized Ruff embroidered on the chest for our interview.

Ruff is unlike anyone else I’ve met in the sustainable fashion space. A former football player, he calls himself an industrialist, and cites Barack Obama and Google’s Sergey Brin as his inspirations, plus Gilded Age titans JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. 

But he also is very much in love with fashion. “I started in fashion as a 7-year-old kid with a sewing machine,” he says. “I was very sure since I was born almost that I was going to be in this industry. I feel uniquely called to work in it and advance it.”

While getting an undergraduate degree in fashion design and merchandising from Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, he spent his senior year in Hong Kong, where he met a Ralph Lauren employee who told him to apply to intern in New York. “I just remember sitting in the room during orientation. It’s myself and about 50 or 60 other interns, and I just want this more than anyone in this room. Honestly, I imagine that’s what love at first sight feels like, where this passion just erupted inside of me.” Within a month, he was offered a paid position. 

Seven years later, he had worked his way up to leading a team to launch new manufacturing software across the company. He’s rhapsodic about his time at Ralph Lauren, but decided to take a couple years to get his MBA in international management in Switzerland. 

It was there that he did a case study on nuclear energy and fell in love with its possibilities. He has a personal connection as well; his mother worked for Cold War Patriots, helping connect former uranium miners and nuclear weapons workers with health care and cash compensation from the government. Surprisingly, her experience led her to support her son’s mission, because, he says, she saw firsthand the safety strides the industry made after the 1970s. 

Ruff is also different from typical sustainability advocates who are calling for a stop to the growth mindset of the fashion industry. “I think that’s where past efforts with sustainability have failed, because they’re asking people to do less and be less and have less,” he says. “I’m not trying to use less. I’m just trying to make more.” 

Ruff sees nuclear power as the leapfrog technology that will allow developing countries to grow their entire economies with clean energy. When he heard about modular nuclear reactors, factory-built plants that can fit on the back of an 18-wheeler and be assembled on-site, like Legos, the idea clicked into place. 

“A huge plant was sort of a long-range goal and out of the question at the moment,” Ruff says. “But if we look at the energy needs to run a factory, that’s something that a micronuclear reactor could absolutely facilitate.” 

In that, he is correct. While a traditional nuclear power plant produces 1,000 megawatts, these micronuclear reactors could provide anywhere from 1 to 300 MW of energy. A typical fashion industrial park would require a 5 MW to 100 MW power plant, according to An Zhou, AII’s senior technical director. 

Some of these modular reactors are fueled with nuclear waste, another appealing aspect to the eco crowd. And they’re safe! At least one of the startups, X-Energy, uses technology that has been declared by researchers as meltdown-proof. That is, you could not have a Chernobyl or Fukushima if you tried, so you can situate it right next to whatever you’re trying to power: a remote community in Alaska that has been flying in diesel, an island whose power grid was wiped out by a natural disaster, or, Ruff is hoping, a large factory or industrial park.

(That description not sexy enough? I encourage you to go learn more about modular nuclear reactors from model and recently turned nuclear influencer Isabelle Boemeke. It’s a soothing ASMR video, enjoy.)

Ruff says he’s been in conversation with micronuclear companies and factories in China, Vietnam, and South Korea that are interested in the technology. But he’s not a full-time startup founder … yet. He’s currently the senior global manager of global brand processing operations for Adidas and will hopefully be moving to Shanghai this spring for the role. He says Adidas is cool with his side hustle as long as he doesn’t leverage their name. Which to be clear, he didn’t. It’s just right there at the top of his LinkedIn page when you look him up, as I did. 

“The thing is, I am seriously, unashamedly promoting the use of nuclear power. I really believe in it as an environmental tool,” he says. “And I know that it can be divisive.” 

Okay, but would this wild idea work? 

“It’s a good idea,” Watson says. He sees microreactors as a neat solution for the problem of onsite thermal energy for boilers. “That’s where I think these plants will come into their own.”

And, shocker, nuclear energy is actually quite safe. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about nuclear, about how dangerous it is,” says David Watson, a nuclear safety engineer from the UK who advocates for nuclear energy via his magazine, Generation Atomic. “When you start delving into the statistics around safety of nuclear, people are always very surprised.” 

For example, 30 people died immediately from Chernobyl, and estimates of people who died later due to cancer caused by the accident range from 4,000 to 60,000. (It’s hard to connect cancer to any one cause.) Air pollution from fossil fuels, like the kind that comes from dye houses burning coal for their boilers, currently kills 7 million people a year worldwide. “Fossil fuels going right kills more people than when nuclear goes wrong,” Watson says. 

The question of nuclear waste is somewhat unresolved, mainly because it needs to be safely stored for thousands of years. But, what we have of it is minuscule and not leaking into the environment like, say, toxic wastewater from dye houses. “People think there’s a waste problem, but fossil fuels are the waste problem,” Watson says. “It all goes out of the chimney. That reactor doesn’t release any waste in an environment. It’s all completely controlled. It’s the only industry that does that.” 

Plus, Watson says that with these modular nuclear reactors being buried underground, security is a low concern. “If you want to make a weapon, there’s a much easier way of doing it just by taking fuel from a mine and enriching it yourself.” 

Still, that doesn’t mean we can give out mini nuclear plants to factories like Oprah giving goodies to her audience. “If this was going to happen in the fashion industry, I would expect to see it in Europe or the United States,” Watson says. “It’s not that Bangladesh couldn’t have it, because Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India are all building nuclear plants. And at that level, they have the human resources and the technical capability to do it. But in terms of like putting it into a small-ish factory in the outskirts of a city, they’re probably not there yet.”

As you may have noticed, nuclear power is politically untenable in many countries right now, including Germany and Italy. In others, like the United States, it’s a delicate conversation that the Biden administration is currently navigating. “If we’re talking China, it’s definitely possible. They’re building like 50 nuclear plants right now,” Watson says. “I think it’s something that could work in the long run. I certainly believe this kind of technology will eventually be everywhere.” 

The voices in the environmental movement advocating for nuclear energy have been growing louder. The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advocates for nuclear energy as a crucial strategy for staying below 1.5 degrees Celsius, and documents leaked in late March show that advisers to the EU say it qualifies as sustainable energy. 

So, micronuclear is safe, it’s politically feasible in China, the world’s largest manufacturer of fashion, and it would be a tidy fix to fashion’s most troublesome climate impacts. What’s the catch? 

A luxury energy product 

Now we get to a more mundane consideration: cost. 

Watson says the only price he’s seen for this new technology is for the startup Oklo’s demo microreactor, which in renderings looks like the kind of futuristic A-frame mountain lodge you would rent on Airbnb. It will generate 1.5 MW — equivalent to one wind turbine — and cost $10 million to build and $3 million a year to run. 

That is a lot of money. It’s the kind of money that only, say, the Defense Department for a highly militarized world power would consider spending on power. “The price will need to come down by orders of magnitude,” Ruff admits. “But it’s coming down with all the competition in the market,” he adds. 

Everyone else I talked to agrees that the fashion industry is too miserly to invest not only in this technology, but most clean technology. Brands shop around to factories for the lowest price, and then they shop around to countries, moving from the US to Mexico to China to Bangladesh and now Ethiopia. “If these garment companies really cared that much about their emissions, they’d have the factories in their own country,” Watson points out. 

Factories are faced with the prospect of investing in a solar array with a payback of 15 years, and seeing their main customer switch to another factory with cheaper prices not long after. Why on earth would they throw down $10 million for a microreactor? “Factories are pretty antiquated places,” Sadowski says. “Like, I wouldn’t start by deploying micronuclear; I would start by actually closing the windows.” 

(A few large brands like Levi’s and H&M are doing just that by funding efficiency assessments of factories through AII and their own programs. But they are in the minority.) 

“We have other things that show they can scale, they’re available now — a mixture of renewable energy, with solar, wind in some places, geothermal, etc,” Cook says. “And if you can combine that with storage that’s beating fossil fuels, let’s do that. Because it’s ready to go.” 

Cook thinks brands should provide financing to factories for renewable upgrades, or follow the tech industry’s lead and commit to large renewable energy projects that can feed an entire industrial park.

“Electronics is signing world-record deals for wind in South Asia and in Taiwan,” he says. “Because they made commitments — Apple, Google, Facebook — utilities are now shifting their investments, they’re dumping coal like crazy, they’re starting to stop building gas plants, and investing in the renewables their customers want.”

We have yet to see the same commitments from H&M, Zara, Walmart, and Nike. Just strongly worded letters to Cambodia and Vietnam telling them to stop building coal plants. Pretty please. 

Despite all the promises the fashion industry has made, it hasn’t engaged with the issue of its climate impact with any real seriousness. And now Rickey Ruff is calling their bluff with a technology that could do it if there were enough willpower and funding. 

“I’ve been working in the private sector for 20 years,” says Sadowski, who most recently was on Nike’s sustainable innovation team. “I thought the private sector had to do it, because the government wasn’t going to do it. But I don’t see how we get there without government intervention. Without the right regulatory signal, there’s only so much a company’s gonna do; it just doesn’t pencil out on a financial perspective. And frankly, you need that regulatory framework to stimulate innovation.” 

When I bring up all these concerns to Ruff, he is undeterred. “You’re totally right, it is a heavy lift. It’s a lifetime mission,” he says. “I’m in the storytelling phase to get the vision out there. But I think with the proper support, though, it’s absolutely not impossible.” 

He grins at me. “I’m very much an optimist if you can’t tell.” 

Whenever a fashion brand makes a commitment to offset its carbon emissions, it needs to explain why it matters. Whenever a journalist like me writes a story about, say, activists protesting London Fashion Week, I also need to tell you why you should care and should keep reading. After all, there are so many other worthy things that demand our attention these days. So consider the following harrowing, commonly repeated facts: 

• Eight to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions comes from the fashion industry, which is more than the aviation and maritime shipping industries combined. 
• The fashion industry produces and sells somewhere between 80 billion and 150 billion garments a year globally. 
• Nearly three-fifths of all clothing produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within years of being made. 

It’s clear that the fashion industry is a big, stinking mess. But if you take a moment to ponder these facts, you realize that something is … off. An estimated range of 80 billion to 150 billion garments a year is ridiculously wide. The two most common estimates for fashion’s greenhouse gas emissions vary by a billion tons, a huge margin of error. And saying three-fifths of clothing will be trashed within “years” is a meaningless statement. 

Yet I pulled all of these statistics and other common facts from reputable sources. McKinsey. The United Nations. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation. The World Bank. International labor unions. Advocacy organizations. And these facts have been cited by publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. 

Not all of these highly respected experts could be wrong. Could they? 

It turns out they could. Because only one out of the dozen or so most commonly cited facts about the fashion industry’s huge footprint is based on any sort of science, data collection, or peer-reviewed research. The rest are based on gut feelings, broken links, marketing, and something someone said in 2003. 

If we’re serious about recruiting the fashion industry into the fight to save our world from burning, these bad facts do us all a disservice. They make fashion activists look silly. They allow brands to wave vaguely at reducing their impact without taking meaningful action. And they stymie the ability to implement meaningful regulation, which needs to be undergirded by solid data. 

There are unmissable clues everywhere that something is wrong, from poisonous rivers in Bangladesh and Indonesia to old clothing littering the shores of East Africa to microplastics in our drinking water. But as long as we have only garbage information, we’ll only get garbage action from brands and governments to fix the problem. 

“Where are the technical papers? Where are the peer-reviewed journals? Where is the serious work?” says Dr. Linda Greer, a former senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and now a senior global fellow at the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese environmental NGO. “You couldn’t even get a master’s degree with this, not even close.” (Sick burn from someone with a PhD in toxicology.) “And here we are trying to run a whole industry’s environmental footprint reduction based on this kind of stuff. It’s kind of preposterous that people put up with it.” 

Greer is intimately familiar with these bad facts and where they come from — she thinks she might inadvertently be responsible for one of the most persistent. Years ago, she looked at sources of water pollution in the only province in China that had good government data, the highly industrialized Jiangsu, and found that the textile industry was the second most polluting after the chemical industry in that particular province. “I thought, okay, for my purposes of NRDC trying to get on top of polluters in China, this is fine. I can use this.” She went on to found the NRDC’s Clean by Design program, which helped increase water and energy efficiency at Chinese textile factories, partly on the basis of this transparently back-of-the-envelope calculation. 

At some point in the next decade, the belief that globally, the fashion industry is the second most polluting industry after oil took off, much to her horror. (It continued to circulate even after I debunked it for Racked in 2017.) And better data has never emerged. “Somebody by now should have gone ahead and figured out what’s really true,” she says. 

As the co-founder of the now-defunct ethical e-tailer Zady, Maxine Bédat used to repeat many of these non-facts at sustainable fashion panels. After Zady shut down, she founded an organization called the New Standard Institute. Her goal is to collect all the best information about the fashion industry in one place and leverage it to pressure fashion brands to do something about their footprint. But as she and NSI research volunteers started to peel away the layers of each statistic, she realized that there was nothing at their core. 

I asked Bédat in January if she had found any fashion facts that were true or had a reliable primary source, but she says NSI is not yet ready to go on the record endorsing anything. “I can tell you a bunch that are not true,” she says. She homes in on the stat that says there are 60 million garment workers globally, which the advocacy organization Clean Clothes cited as from the International Labor Organization. “We reached out to ILO, who doesn’t have a record of this information. It was also used by BetterWorks, Sustainable Brand Solidarity Center, and IndustriAll. Seventy-five million garment workers globally was also found in a Clean Clothes publication, and they cite Fashion United, but the link doesn’t mention that stat.” 

This is what happens in the fashion sustainability space. One organization puts out a fact, and four other organizations link to it, and then nobody remembers or cares who first made the claim. 

The statistic that 4 percent of global waste is from the fashion industry is the most well-sourced fact I’ve found, eventually leading back to a report by the UK nonprofit Waste & Resources Action Program (WRAP) on the waste associated with clothing sold in the UK, which is based on a peer-reviewed tool whose methodology is laid out in a robust technical analysis. It still may not be true, given that the global waste figure is extrapolated from UK figures and then compared to a stat from the UN, which hasn’t proved to be very reliable on fashion figures. But at least it’s transparent. 

WRAP’s transparency is in contrast to the consulting firm McKinsey, which says that between 2000 and 2014, global clothing production doubled, and the number of garments purchased each year by the average consumer increased by around 60 percent, to 100 billion garments per year. (The documentary The True Cost says we purchase 80 billion garments a year, while the World Economic Forum puts it at 150 billion.) Where did the figure of 100 billion garments come from? McKinsey would only say that it analyzed proprietary data provided by market research firms to come to their conclusions. And yet, in fashion’s desert of scientific research, a report with zero footnotes from a company that has reportedly helped Saudi Arabia silence critics and — over objections from the World Health Organization — brought an ethos of cost-cutting to the arena of global health is what passes for reputable information. 

The McKinsey website also used to say that nearly three-fifths of all clothing produced ends up in incinerators or landfills within “one year” of being made but at some point changed it to the vague “within years.” 

An Ellen MacArthur Foundation report says that 20 percent of global industrial water pollution is from the fashion industry, but EcoTextile News shredded this in its December issue dedicated to myth-busting, tracking the statistic back to a vague assertion by a 2012 paper that attributed it to the World Bank; the bank denied it was the origin of the fact. Also attributed to the World Bank is the fact that 80 percent of garment workers worldwide are women, but when I asked, a representative directed me to an article that says 80 percent of garment workers in Bangladesh are women and then to a conflicting World Bank report that says it’s actually 54 percent. The idea that the average American throws away 80 pounds of clothing comes from a 2014 Environmental Protection Agency report, but that data is also inaccurate: It includes textiles like carpets and mattresses and garment factory waste.

And finally, one statistic you’ll see in almost every story and at every panel: the greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the global fashion industry. According to the UN, it’s 10 percent of global emissions. But according to a 2018 report by the sustainability consulting firm Quantis, it’s 8 percent. 

“Let’s talk for a moment about the Quantis report,” says Greer. “They refused to provide anybody — me, ClimateWorks Foundation that funded them, or the general public — any of the data that went into their conclusions. If you were to try to publish that in a peer-reviewed journal, you would be rejected in 30 minutes. It should have died a quick death.” 

Quantis disputes Greer’s characterization, saying that they delivered the data and methodology behind the report to ClimateWorks and the steering committee for the report, though the report is not peer-reviewed. And since the information is proprietary in a project by Quantis involving brands, industry groups, and the Swiss government to collect lifecycle data, they won’t publish the data until 2021.

ClimateWorks said in an emailed statement, “While the results were aligned with the original project scope and based on life cycle assessment science and methodology, they are not commensurate with the data sources used by ClimateWorks (IEA energy modeling). ClimateWorks has therefore decided not to co-brand ‘Measuring Fashion’ report, but values the work that Quantis has done to produce this study.” For what it’s worth, IEA’s estimation of the emissions of the textile and leather industries is many times smaller than the Quantis report’s.

The report was pulled off the Quantis website for a few months, then republished without ClimateWorks’ name on it. And it keeps getting cited. By me, by other journalists, by panelists, by everyone. There’s just nothing else to go on. 

Even without good data, brands and countries are attempting to lessen the fashion industry’s impact. Last year, 150 companies joined a pact where they agreed to “science-based” targets around emissions, biodiversity, and single-use plastics by 2050. It’s the latest in a long line of industry groups, agreements, conferences, promises, and “sustainable” product lines. But companies still don’t know what is happening in their supply chains and so have no baseline for what they will cut their emissions from. (According to a report by Greer’s organization, Nike is the only brand that regularly asks for emissions data from its factories in China.)

Some of this bad data has even cynically been pressed into service to increase our consumption. “Double sales and retention,” crows a marketing company that creates carbon emission calculators for eco brands. “By purchasing a product, visitors fully understand their positive environmental impact!” 

Brands have also zeroed in on circular design, a utopian economy where waste materials would be recycled right back into new clothes. (Right now, we think that 99 percent of old clothing is eventually landfilled or burned. Don’t ask me to find the primary source for that.) As a result, Nordic countries — the only governments that have committed any resources to improving the fashion industry — are pouring money into textile R&D. Sure, that will help with waste, but what if it ends up increasing fashion’s footprint in other areas? 

“Where is the data that shows what the difference is in terms of carbon emissions, water use, toxic chemical use in a fully circular economy for the fashion industry?” Greer asks. “I’ve yet to see numbers.” She’s spent decades at the NRDC working to protect the environment from industrial pollution and knows firsthand the kind of robust research literature that has to undergird government rulemaking on corporate pollution. The false stat about how much global industrial water pollution comes from the fashion industry, for instance, is not going to cut it. “If they put out a rule that is based on something as flip-floppy as this 20 percent stat, then it’s not going to survive a courtroom challenge,” she says. 

It’s clear that before we do anything else — demand legislation, invent new textiles, set targets — we need to figure out what research we need, then ask the government and big brands to fund it. 

“We need a landscape assessment of the data and an analysis of the gaps and inconsistencies that’s crisp,” Greer says. “And then a call for funding the research to fill those gaps. Then we’d be making progress.” 

That money needs to come from the government or a consortium of fashion brands, because getting good data is expensive. For example, the California nonprofit Fibershed is planning a fiber mapping project where it would go into people’s closets, look at all the tags in their clothing, weigh the clothing, and then process the data to yield high-quality research on the fiber mix in our closets. Founder Rebecca Burgess estimates that it will cost more than $100,000 just for California. 

“All these sociological and quantitative data sets on the labor side would cost as much or more money,” Burgess says. “We need funding for people to be on the ground to take water samples, to go into factories and count how many workers are women. Unless the public is crying for it, who is going to fund that?” 

There is some progress. Last May, Stella McCartney and Google announced a partnership to test Google’s data-processing prowess by quantifying the impact of various types of cotton and viscose, using McCartney’s data and more data they hope to collect from researchers and brands. But the fear is that the resulting data will only be available for brands to use.

“There’s not enough investment in academia, but I can say there’s a lot of money in private research,” says Dr. Joanne Brasch, a lecturer at UC Davis on textile sustainability and special project manager at the nonprofit California Product Stewardship Council. She sees her students get snapped up by fashion brands at graduation, essentially privatizing the vast majority of fashion science. 

This might be her last year at UC Davis, too. Her research funding has dried up, and UC Davis shut down the two undergraduate majors, textiles and clothing and polymer science. Incoming graduate students interested in fashion sustainability will now have to choose either fashion design or material engineering. Students revolted and signed a resolution against the move, but it was no use. Instead of researching what fashion does to our world, they now can only study how to make more of it. 

“This stuff isn’t rocket science,” Bédat says. “The industry just hasn’t invested and prioritized this information. And if we don’t invest as an industry in this process, any company can say anything and we can’t say yes or no on whether it’s a meaningful process.” 

But despite all this, she thinks the conversation is shifting. “I am hopeful in this year and decade that we’re moving toward bringing clarity into this space.”

This story has been updated with a quote from Quantis.

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