Plastics Industry Edited California Textbooks

bankston:

Under pressure from the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group for the plastics industry, schools officials in California edited a new environmental curriculum to include positive messages about plastic shopping bags, interviews and documents show.

The rewritten textbooks and teachers’ guides coincided with a public relations and lobbying effort by the chemistry council to fight proposed plastic bag bans throughout the country. But despite the positive message, activists say there is no debate: Plastic bags kill marine animals, leech toxic chemicals and take an estimated 1,000 years to decompose in landfills.

The Religious Right in Texas, led by the followers of the late Mel and Norma Gabler, protest any textbooks that come up before the Texas State Board of Education, that don’t fit their religious, anti-environmental, right wing agenda.

(via randomactsofchaos)