Plastic has already taken over our households, our electronics, and even our clothes–and lately it’s taken over the news, too. It seems like everywhere you turn, images of plastic waste crowding oceans and beaches are broadcast while yet another corporation announces a ban on single-use plastic items like straws.

McDonald’s and Starbucks are teaming up to develop a fully compostable coffee cup. Hyatt Hotels, Disney, American Airlines, the Barclays Center and dozens of other major corporations have vowed to phase out offering and using plastic straws. It’s a tremendous movement across industries to combat a collective problem, unprecedented in recent memory. But we’ve been so busy lauding these efforts, we’ve devoted little time to examining the heart of the matter: Will this help? Or is it merely corporate greenwashing and PR spin?

Take Starbucks, for example. The coffee giant is aiming to phase out most single-use plastic straws on iced drinks, replacing them with newly developed… plastic lids. Starbucks insists the new strawless lids are made from polypropylene content that’s widely recyclable, unlike plastic straws. But currently, only around 9% of recyclable plastic is actually recycled. So introducing more single-use options that have a 91% chance of winding up in a landfill or the ocean doesn’t seem like much of a real solution.

And most companies who plan to phase out plastic straws without developing a substitute said nothing of their continued use of plastic utensils, packaging, and other plastic products. Are we being duped?

To fairly evaluate corporations’ response to and responsibilities in the global plastics crisis, it’s instructive to first take stock of how we got here.

It may seem as though we woke up one day this summer suddenly drowning in plastic waste. That’s not completely untrue: Plastic waste has been building up for decades, but until recently, the U.S. shipped most of it half a world away, in China. But on January 1 of this year, China officially stepped down as the world’s landfill and banned the import of other countries’ solid waste: suddenly the plastic we so casually throw away had nowhere to go. This dilemma was exacerbated by our critical lack of waste management infrastructure. We simply do not have the structures in place to deal with the garbage we produce.

The result is that around 275 million metric tons of plastic garbage is created each year, and of that, an estimated 8 million metric tons is dumped into the world’s oceans each year. Over the last 70 years, we’ve produced approximately 8 billion metric tons of plastic that has to go somewhere. Plastic requires hundreds of years to decompose, eventually breaking down into microplastics that live forever, ultimately either in landfills or our oceans.