Kickstart: A small April Fools' take on plastics

Plastics mostly sailed through April Fools' Day 2025 unscathed. No threats of giving up on the Earth in favor of Mars due to plastic pollution, as in 2024, no images of socialite Paris Hilton wearing an outfit made from plastic packaging as in 2017 and no "Google Cardboard Plastic" virtual reality viewer as in 2016.

But that doesn't mean the material completely escaped attention.

Consumer products company Grove Collaborative targeted the low recycling rate for plastic packaging in its April 1-timed news release claiming to introduce the "5% Collection."

"By shrinking these products to just 5 percent of the size of normal products and packaging them in virgin plastic, we ensure that our packaging will be recycled since only 5 percent of plastic actually gets recycled," Alex Bede, sustainability director at Grove, said in a news release. (Alexandra Bede is a real person with that title at Grove, for what it's worth.)

But the British Plastics Federation flipped the script in a social media post and used April Fools' to promote the value of plastics.

In a series of photos, the trade group claimed it was changing its name to the British Paper Federation. It followed that up with claims about how paper packaging could keep food fresh longer and that paper is recyclable and lighter, which makes it more environmentally friendly. Then it quickly noted those claims were actually related to plastic, not paper, and used a QR code to provide more information on sustainability.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is showing up in public policy strategies on the local, regional, national and international level. Plastics News' Steve Toloken writes about a discussion on the ramifications of EPR from the Plastics Recycling Conference in March.

But what, exactly, does EPR cover, and where did it come from?

Our sister paper Sustainable Plastics has an in-depth look into EPR from its history — Sweden was the first country to adopt it on a national scale, in 1991 — to how it is used today.

As Beatriz Santos writes, EPR generally refers to a fee paid on items such as packaging, tires, mattresses and other items that is used to help pay for their disposal. But there are a lot of variations on those themes.

Case Western Reserve University is helping students cut microplastics pollution at the washing machine.

The school in Cleveland is installing specialized filtration systems at student laundry facilities that are capable of capturing 90 percent of the particles shed by textiles such as acrylic and polyester when they're washed. About 35 percent of microplastics found in oceans comes from textiles, researchers say.

CWRU says that for every 100 CLEANR-brand filters installed in university housing facilities, the equivalent of 5,600 credit cards worth of plastics are prevented from entering the environment each year.