Avoiding plastic is the new radical chic. On April 21 the Guardian ran a long story suggesting that “zero-waste shops” are the way to “avert catastrophe.” Lifestyle magazines champion bamboo toothbrushes and buying grains in bulk. Last year at least five books were published on living without plastic, and plastic-free community groups have popped up across Europe and North America. Many middle-class shoppers are so scared to be seen using plastic bags that they end up with a massive pile of canvas tote bags at home — one for each time they showed up at the supermarket empty-handed.

This trend is particularly strong in the UK. Many Britons watched David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II, a 2017 BBC series that showed the tragic consequences plastic waste has for wildlife. This led to a lot of guilt and a fair bit of green proselytizing. As one reviewer put it “If you are still getting over the albatrosses feeding their young plastics on Blue Planet 2, now is the time to go and manically recycle.”

But this energy is misdirected. Amid all the fuss about coffee cups and recycling, there’s one thing that we never hear about: the plastics industry. Since plastic drink bottles first appeared in the 1970s, global plastic production has increased twenty-fold, and it is expected to quadruple again by 2050. Yet the problem is still framed as a matter of consumers’ individual conscience. That suits the plastics industry just fine. When Theresa May proposed a tax on plastic packaging — the world’s first — the British Plastics Federation said that it was “very disturbed” at her tone and pointed out that “littering” was a matter of “personal behavior.”