The world is drowning in plastic waste. Traditional recycling barely makes a dent in the trash heap — it’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.
When reporter Lisa Song started digging into the crisis, she discovered the little-known world of “pyrolysis.” The plastics industry is heralding the technology as nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced” type of chemical recycling. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks. All those pesky, unrecyclable granola bar wrappers and produce bags would be disintegrated and built back up to make new plastic, again and again. Or so they said.
As Song researched the pyrolysis process, several things became abundantly clear: 1. Pyrolysis is really complicated, 2. Pyrolysis is extremely inefficient, and 3. The plastics industry is using all kinds of mathematical tricks to make pyrolysis seem more effective than it is. Song knew the truth about pyrolysis needed to come out, but explaining it to the reader would require more than thorough reporting and a written story.
Song teamed up with graphics editor Lucas Waldron, designer Anna Donlan and visual editor Alex Bandoni to build an explanatory story that relied on illustration and animation to walk the reader through how pyrolysis works and how the process is manipulated so companies can claim their products contain much more “recycled plastic” than they actually do. The team hired freelance illustrator Max Guther to create an immersive opener illustration and the building blocks of explanatory graphics throughout the story.
Other articles in the series showed how household brand-name companies are trying to loosen the definition of “recyclable” to benefit their business, how the industry has special access to international negotiators at the United Nations plastics treaty conference and the plastic industry’s wishlist that provides a preview of what could happen in this second Trump administration.
