China shut its doors to our recyclable materials, two years ago, and the bottom fell out of plastics recycling in the United States.  A recent NPR investigation, "How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled" (see article here) illuminated the facts that less than 10% of all plastics generated ever get recycled and that the recycling process degrades plastic once it is reused meaning that it can only be reused once or twice anyways.  Virtually all plastics end up in landfills.  The only plastics with nominal recycling value are plastics numbers "1" and "2", therefore you can be sure that any plastics with recycling numbers 3 through 7 will end up in your local landfill where they will persist for hundreds of years.  The plastics industry has duped us into believing that the little recycling triangle with a number in the middle means that the item can be recycled if we drop it into our blue bins.

All of this brings us back to Fairlife.  Not only does Fairlife package nearly all of their milk products in plastic bottles (as opposed to cartons which are made primarily of paper products which can be recycled or, at worst, are mostly biodegradable), they use the LEAST earth friendly plastic (number 7) to package their milk.  You can rest uneasily knowing that virtually all the hundreds of thousands of plastic Fairlife milk containers generated every year will end up in your local landfill where your grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren will still be able to find them in the next millennium.  Urge Fairlife to immediately seek alternative packaging to lessen their corporate impact on our environment.