Closed Loop Fund takes red pen to Tierney essay

Perhaps taking a cue from the PolitiFact truth-in-politics scoring system, a blogger for the Closed Loop Fund has offered a red pen edited fact-checking counterpoint to John Tierney’s “The Reign of Recycling” article.

In his blog post, Rob Kaplan presents Tierney’s Oct. 3, 2015, New York Times column with considerable red pen margin notes along both sides of the article.

Writing on behalf of the “Closed Loop Fund Team,” Kaplan says the group was “astounded by the sheer number of inaccurate statements and misrepresentations about the economic and environmental impact of the recycling industry. We thought it would be helpful to point a bunch of them out and share third-party, verifiable sources.”

Margin notes authored by the group refer to recycling versus landfilling costs in New York City and elsewhere and to ongoing investments being made in recycling by profit-minded private companies, among other topics.

Recyclers who find themselves answering questions posed by readers of the Tierney article may find themselves well served to keep the Closed Loop Fund “red pen” version handy to have as a reply.

The Closed Loop Fund describes itself as “a social impact fund investing $100 million to increase the recycling of products and packaging.” Fund contributors include Walmart, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Goldman Sachs, Colgate-Palmolive, 3M and Keurig.