This article is part of a special report, The Recycling Myth.

The effort to promote recycling has been too successful.

That’s the argument being made by some environmentalists, as they point to a perception among consumers that if they carefully sort their glass, paper and plastic, they aren’t polluting the planet.

“The message about recycling is so positive that it becomes an incentive to consider that recyclable waste is not really waste,” said Flore Berlingen, director of Zero Waste France, an NGO.

It’s not that recycling is bad. It’s certainly better for the environment than landfilling or burning unsorted trash. But there’s a growing worry among environmentalists that it could be promoting additional consumption — and additional waste.

If people believe they can buy aluminum coffee capsules, plastic water bottles or even new cars, expecting that everything will be recycled and reused, it allows them to consume with a clean conscience.

“The positive emotions associated with recycling can overpower the negative emotions associated with wasting” — Monic Sun and Remi Trudel, professors at Boston University

“Today, we are in a very productivist capitalist model of overconsumption and overproduction," said French Green MEP David Cormand. “We can see that this is incompatible with our ecological objectives and the maintenance of life on Earth.”

Monic Sun and Remi Trudel, professors at Boston University, studied consumption patterns and reactions to recycling-awareness campaigns. They showed that “the positive emotions associated with recycling can overpower the negative emotions associated with wasting.”

In their paper, the professors warned that recycling promotional campaigns don’t do a good job of showing the economic and environmental costs of recycling, and so don’t provide an incentive to prevent waste from being generated in the first place.

"In this sense, recycling becomes the alibi for single-use and even its main justification,” Berlingen said.