NPR investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan
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“The most important thing that people need to understand when they're looking at plastic is that it is trash. It is not valuable. It cannot and will not be turned into something new without great expense that nobody's going to pay for.”
--- NPR Investigative Correspondent, Laura Sullivan
Reporting for NPR’s Planet Money, investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan found herself sifting through boxes of decades-old archives, and stumbled upon 50-year-old oil and gas industry trade notes. They led her to one compelling central source – a former plastics “big whig” – and down a reporting path about the damning history and the questionable future of plastic recycling.
The impressive end result garnered Sullivan a 2022 duPont-Columbia Awards Silver Baton, a remarkable third win in her storied career.
In a Zoom interview with the J-School’s Prizes Department Executive Director Abi Wright and duPont Awards Director Lisa R. Cohen, Sullivan talks about the devastating lessons she learned buried in all those documents: that the solution to plastic pollution was never, and will never, be recycling.
Sullivan explains how effectively the oil and gas industry covered up the futility of plastic recycling by funding advertising campaigns that reached Americans from the supermarket on down to grade schools. These campaigns impressed upon the public that plastics aren’t a threat to the environment, as long as they are dropped into recycling bins. But that’s a lie, Sullivan uncovered, and the plastics industry knew it all along.
In this episode, you’ll hear how Sullivan used basic, relentless shoe leather reporting to track down the “smoking gun,” then got the former lobbyist’s unfiltered confession on tape. And you’ll hear Sullivan’s sage advice for how to push through the “rabbit hole after rabbit hole of a rabbit hole” of reporting to triumph in the end.