California Aims To Ban Recycling Symbols on Things That Aren't Recyclable (nytimes.com) 214
The well-known three-arrows symbol doesn't necessarily mean that a product is actually recyclable. A new bill would limit the products allowed to feature the mark. From a report: The triangular "chasing arrows" recycling symbol is everywhere: On disposable cups. On shower curtains. On children's toys. What a lot of shoppers might not know is that any product can display the sign, even if it isn't recyclable. It's false advertising, critics say, and as a result, countless tons of non-recyclable garbage are thrown in the recycling bin each year, choking the recycling system. Late on Wednesday, California took steps toward becoming the first state to change that. A bill passed by the state's assembly would ban companies from using the arrows symbol unless they can prove the material is in fact recycled in most California communities, and is used to make new products.
"It's a basic truth-in-advertising concept," said California State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat and the bill's lead sponsor. "We have a lot of people who are dutifully putting materials into the recycling bins that have the recycling symbols on them, thinking that they're going to be recycled, but actually, they're heading straight to the landfill," he said. The measure, which is expected to clear the State Senate later this week and be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is part of a nascent effort across the country to fix a recycling system that has long been broken.
Though materials like paper or metals are widely recycled, less than 10 percent of plastic consumed in the United States is recycled, according to the most recent estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, most plastic is incinerated or dumped in landfills, with the exception of some types of resins, like the kind used for bottled water or soda. For years, the United States also shipped much of its plastic waste overseas, choking local rivers and streams. A global convention now bans most trade in plastic waste, though U.S. waste exports have not completely ceased. This summer, Maine and Oregon passed laws overhauling their states' recycling systems by requiring corporations to pay for the cost of recycling their packaging. In Oregon, the law included plans to establish a task force that would evaluate "misleading or confusing claims" related to recycling. Legislation is pending in New York that would, among other things, ban products from displaying misleading claims.
"It's a basic truth-in-advertising concept," said California State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat and the bill's lead sponsor. "We have a lot of people who are dutifully putting materials into the recycling bins that have the recycling symbols on them, thinking that they're going to be recycled, but actually, they're heading straight to the landfill," he said. The measure, which is expected to clear the State Senate later this week and be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is part of a nascent effort across the country to fix a recycling system that has long been broken.
Though materials like paper or metals are widely recycled, less than 10 percent of plastic consumed in the United States is recycled, according to the most recent estimates by the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, most plastic is incinerated or dumped in landfills, with the exception of some types of resins, like the kind used for bottled water or soda. For years, the United States also shipped much of its plastic waste overseas, choking local rivers and streams. A global convention now bans most trade in plastic waste, though U.S. waste exports have not completely ceased. This summer, Maine and Oregon passed laws overhauling their states' recycling systems by requiring corporations to pay for the cost of recycling their packaging. In Oregon, the law included plans to establish a task force that would evaluate "misleading or confusing claims" related to recycling. Legislation is pending in New York that would, among other things, ban products from displaying misleading claims.
Link without paywall (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.recyclingproductne... [recyclingproductnews.com]
I'm all for this (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually try (painstakingly sometimes) to recycle as much as possible, but it was only recently (from various media reports) that I learned how little of it actually ends up being recycled. Now I feel like most of my efforts were wasted.
Anything that lets consumers know that something isn't really recyclable will, hopefully, force manufacturers to actually make their products properly recyclable.
Re:I'm all for this (Score:5, Interesting)
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So the problem here is plastics. The source of that problem is that recycling plastics (and most recycling) is very energy intensive. So most recycling actually makes more CO2 because it uses lots of energy
So then perhaps the real solution is to ban plastic use for certain products, like was done for plastic shopping bags in some places, where feasible for the product type (ie. I don't expect toys to go full-on metal, since they typically do last a while, and can become hand-me-downs).
Re:I'm all for this (Score:5, Interesting)
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And then.. and then people could return the empty container to a designated facility and get their $0.10 back!
Oh wait - 10 US states already do that:
https://www.bottlebill.org/ind... [bottlebill.org]
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The other solution is to just bake the cost of environmental disposal into the item itself.
Yeah, why should poor parents get to buy their kids toys? There are plenty of charities to cover that.
Class warfare red herring is a red herring.
Why should any parents get to buy their kids cheap toys manufactured from processes that we are told are triggering a Climate Crisis that will render the planet an uninhabitable disaster in those kids' lifetime?
If you reason for not avoiding an immanent planetary Cataclysm is the obligatory "POC and poor communities hit hardest by price increase on plastic teacups for the Barbie playset" narrative, then I have to wonder about the coherence of your Values Hierarchy.
Re:I'm all for this (Score:5, Interesting)
A better solution would be to require most plastic products to actually be either recyclable (which the company responsible for any that don't get recycled) or compostable...i.e. biodegradable in a way that does not require photo-dissociation to happen first. Merely bury it in a heap with dirt and water for a few years.
Unfortunately, there hasn't been much profit in making those kinds of packaging, so they haven't been developed. Both "sort of" exist, but are unsatisfactory for various reasons, because development hasn't been pushed. Perhaps these laws will be sufficient to cause the development to be pushed, but I wouldn't bet large sums on it.
P.S.: The "real recyclable" is clearly possible, as there are biodegradable waxes and milk was for long sold in waxed cardboard containers...before they switched to plasticized cardboard or just plastic bottles. It may well not be usable in every case, but it's sure a lot more usable than is current practice.
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Unfortunately, there hasn't been much profit in making those kinds of packaging, so they haven't been developed.
Yes, the motive for plastic was to make packaging cheaper. When glass bottles were replaced by plastic no prices went down, they actually went up. But the beverage companies got a nice short-term windfall
Real solution, no more plastic/styrofoam period for packaging, yes will cause inconvenience for many, but if one wants to solve the issue then they need to get serious and look to real solutions.
Right now in reality all recyclables end up in a land fill somewhere, easy enough to check by a search.
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The "real recyclable" is clearly possible, as there are biodegradable waxes and milk was for long sold in waxed cardboard containers
Biodegradable isn't the same as recyclable, though.
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Biodegradable isn't the same as recyclable, though.
It's not the same, but it's often better. Not always, which is why both options should be allowed. And even just "it really *is* garbage", though that should have a *very* hefty price tag associated with it.
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I think the real solution is to put the cost of dealing with the product on the manufacturer rather than the customer. That gives manufacturers an incentive to reduce the environmental cost but also gives them some flexibility in how to do it. Maybe the most efficient way is to redesign it to use recyclable components. Maybe that isn't feasible and they just need to eat the cost of disposing of the parts that can't be recycled. Maybe it will encourage them to invest in recycling technology so the materi
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I think you may be on to something there. The only real reasons plastics became so prevalent is because they are far cheaper and more convenient -- for the manufacturer. Ob. old fart here, I remember when toothpaste came in a *metal* tube or in powdered form in a *steel* can. Jars were made of glass -- you didn't see any sort of food storage in plastic. etc.etc. *all* of it -everything- was recyclable 40-50 yrs ago. (with the possible exception of circuit boards. Point being, you hardly saw plastic at all,
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One thing about those plastic bottles that always aggravated me is the fact that you cannot get *all* of the product out. I agree about the manufacturer being responsible (never gonna happen...) and biodegradeable packaging. Perhaps a law that mandates complete bio-degradability within 20 yrs of use or something.
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Any cost added to the manufacturer will be passed along to the consumer.
The question is really, where should the cost be born from? Supply side - taxes/incentives to the manufacturers to utilize more recycle-friendly packaging? Or, consumption side - through recycling programs?
Something seems wonky with taxing the supply side to facilitate the consumption side. Too many hands between the two for the monies to get lost. Not enough incentives for either to do the right thing.
One area we're going to need t
Re:I'm all for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, but that cost will be added explicitly rather than hidden as an externality. Manufacturers still have the incentive to reduce the environmental cost to give them a price or profit margin advantage over their competitors, and the ability to do that is in the hands of the party with the most control.
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> Today, a working-class or middle-class family can say, "Hey Alexa, turn on the living room lights at 40% and set the heater for 68 degrees".
Last time I tried this, she threatened to file divorce papers so now I have to do it myself.
Re: I'm all for this (Score:2)
And let's not forget the phthalates...
Not all plastic release these but I often find that the number indicating the type of plastic, which should be inside the recycle icon, is missing (so you can apply the rule of tumb - four and five and one and two, all the rest are bad for you). I refuse to use such products.
On top of that I assure you it is rather trivial to come with alternatives, both in terms of the phthalates and recycling.
But it will require massive rework of some manufacturing.
So what? Both the
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So, it's just a matter of spending OPM (Other People's Money, for those not up on that sort of thing), eh? Amazing how many people think it's perfectly fine with spending OPM. But expect them to spend their own money to solve a problem, not such a good id
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The source of that problem is that recycling plastics (and most recycling) is very energy intensive. So most recycling actually makes more CO2 because it uses lots of energy.
Citation needed
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If the packaging material isn't economically viable to recycle then the manufacturer should be required to offset the cost or use different packaging.
Why is packaging that ends up in the landfill even allowed on store shelves?
Re: I'm all for this (Score:2)
My town ceased all recycling during the pandemic because the sorters couldn't stand close enough to work. Now they are all vaccinated recycling came back on. But still we have hickups. We stopped recycling glass for 3 months because no one would take the pile of broken glass that we had.
Recycling with profit is hard.
Re:I'm all for this (Score:5, Interesting)
Most plastic is physically possible to recycle. The problem is that only un-pigmented #1 and #2 plastic are *economically viable* to recycle.
Some plastics are almost but not quite viable to recycle -- like #5. Under a rule that bans the recycling symbol on "unrecycleable" plastics, #5 probably should not get the symbol, but that would preclude #5 from ever being recyclable. It's a catch-22: to recycle #5 you need to attract investment, but you can't attract investment because #5 won't be entering the recycling stream. What's more taking the recycling symbols of pigmented plastics and hard-to-recycle plastics like #6 isn't going to stop those plastics from being used then dumped.
To stop plastic from entering municipal landfills and then leaching into the environment as microplastics, we've got to reduce plastic use and increase the recycling of the plastics we do use. About the only way I can think of doing this is taxing virgin, non-biodegradable plastic by type then distributing the proceeds to recycling programs based on the amount of each type they successfully resell. When nobody has any unsold waste plastic, then the tax is as high as it needs to be.
Recycling as it is now practiced in the US is a PR scam to shift the blame for plastic pollution onto consumers *who can do very little to significantly effect the amount of plastic waste they generate*. This shifts the blame for plastic pollution away from companies that use unnecessary plastic in their packaging, so nothing gets done about that.
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My parents just throw aluminum cans in the garbage now because they heard the reports that "recycling is fake."
My intuition is that aluminum is probably actually recycled. And hopefully cardboard? But I have looked for information on whether recycling on the consumer
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My parents just throw aluminum cans in the garbage now because they heard the reports that "recycling is fake."
There's a bit of a Catch-22 with regards to recycling. Even aside from the technical hurdles for various plastics, what materials make sense economically to recycle does vary somewhat over time. If recyclers keep changing what they'll accept from consumers, the consumers complain about that. But if the recyclers keep collecting a broader pool of potentially recyclable materials, and in turn discard those materials which aren't currently economically viable to process, then people complain about how "all rec
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Just say no.
Don't buy stuff unless you are certain that it can be recycled. (Probably only paper or cardboard.)
No plastic, aluminum cans, etc.
Just say no.
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https://www.greenbiz.com/artic... [greenbiz.com]
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Glass and aluminum can be recycled and it's fairly efficient.
The problem is that most cans and bottles don't make it to the point where they are recycled. They just end up in land fills or trash on the side of the road.
Just say no.
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Part of the problem is that what is recyclable in one borough (I live in the UK) might not be in the neighbouring one. Uniform rules would help a lot.
USA is way behind the curve on this (Score:4, Interesting)
The entire nation needs to push manufacturers towards industry wide recycling programs that actually recycle and reduce need of sorting through various material types. Other countries are doing a far superior job which in turn just makes the U.S.A. look incompetent.
What's worse is such programs outside the U.S. see little exposure by the media so those people in the U.S. are left assuming that the practices are the norm.
Re:USA is way behind the curve on this (Score:5, Insightful)
other countries doing superior job? no, that's just a meme and your head canon, sounds good to you and you want it to be true.
https://www.mckinsey.com/indus... [mckinsey.com]
Go watch John Oliver's bit on plastics (Score:3)
Any meaningful change would require laws that force those costs onto manufacturers who in turn would need to actually solve the problem. Anything else will just get shot down by lobbying efforts.
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This is where regulation is actually good. No one manufacturer is going to make their product more expensive, because they'll be at a competitive disadvantage. The higher cost is borne by the consumer either way but it has to be equalized to make it happen. Consumers don't actually like buying cheap junk over and over when it breaks.
If there's competition then the consumer wins (Score:2)
Also, the consumer pays either way, they pay in the form of disposing the waste, in the economic effects of climate change (e.g. paying to fix everything after a flood/hurricane) and with increased rates of heart and lung disease from air pollution. That's what's meant by "externalizing costs". It's difficult to think of those cost
Can't wait for California to ban NYTimes Paywall (Score:5, Informative)
Editors ever consider posting stories that your readers can actually read?
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https://archive.is/ [archive.is]
https://archive.is/GSM4v [archive.is]
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I know how to get there, but it shouldn't be your job or my job to do so. Slashdot actually employs editors.
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While you are technically correct, there’s a small but significant difference between “Slashdot actually employs editors” and “Slashdot employs actual editors”.
Editors don't care (Score:2)
They have a very low effort job with no oversight and near zero work required. Their content consistently reflects how little they care and their contempt for readers.
Slashdot readers would promptly migrate to a new site run like old Slashdot but none exist.
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Most readers here are bright enough to bypass a paywall.
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Most readers here are bright enough to bypass a paywall.
Indeed we are. But why should we need to? Are Editors not bright enough? Are Editors worthless? Is Slashdot owned by the NYTimes to attempt to drive traffic to them? Is ArchieBunker msmash's subservient bitch who not only manually works around the problem but praises the extra effort his mistress puts him through while saying please may I have another?
Which is it? I'm going to go with the last one. Now be a good boy and look up your own link. Slashdot isn't some kind of "news aggregator" after all.
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You must be new here.
Never read the comments? (Score:2)
> Most readers here are bright
Have you not read any of the comments on Slashdot?
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Cool story. Glad to hear Slashdot only caters exclusively to you.
Whose fault? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are the products actually not recyclable (made of of unrecyclable materials), or is it just that the recyclers don't want them? For example, in my town pizza boxes are recyclable, in the next town over they are not. Would it be 'false advertising' for the boxes to have recycling symbols?
Re:Whose fault? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sidestepping your larger point: pizza boxes have generally been considered not-recyclable [google.com], unless you painstakingly cut away and trash any portions that have grease stains, sauce, cheese, or other contamination. The contamination, when mingled with "clean" cardboard, can result in recycled products that are substandard. But even this is evolving, as paper manufacturers have gotten more adept at dealing with contamination.
All of which just feeds into your larger point: what is 'recyclable' or not is mostly a question of who's buying the stuff, and whether they can economically make use of it. A number of municipalities in my region stopped accepting glass for recycling - glass! - because the market for it tanked a few years back. Nevermind that recycling glass is technologically easy, and that virgin glass is very energy intensive to make. But that, too, is changing as domestic recyclers ramp up capacity to make use of it.
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IIRC, producing glass from old glass takes 10 times less energy than from sand... so it is very strange that any manufacturer prefer the sand... maybe a very high level of contamination in the glass (excluding mirrors, pyrex cristal, in glass it is usual isn't hard to remove then as other recyclable materials). If that is the reasons, only education people can help
Energy is subsidized (Score:2)
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OT -- but I need to point out that you have your own trolls now, quite active in some other threads. I just got fooled by one of them. rsilvergin and rsillvergun
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Meanwhile, the pizza boxes claim to be recyclable and have their own propaganda web site [dominos.com] saying so.
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Maybe Dominos is referring to their pizza? The crust is made out of the same material as the box after all.
Pizza boxes are considered recyclable by the waste management people where I live as well, how they do that, I have no idea though.
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Pizza boxes are considered recyclable by the waste management people where I live as well, how they do that, I have no idea though.
Are they considered recyclable, or are they considered compostable?
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Food-soiled paper packaging is "welcomed" in the single source recycling bin; however, it is listed along side fruits and vegetable waste, so perhaps they are just composting it when sorting.
I was always taught that you shouldn't put items with oils or other fats into the compost, as it causes problems, perhaps they have some way to deal with this though.
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Sorry, but recycling glass isn't easy. Coke could do it in the old days because they were recycling Coke bottles, so the ingredients were the same. Many glasses have coloring materials added, or various other things to create various other properties.
Now if all you want to do is make glass bricks, then pretty much any glass is recyclable, but that's a very low end product. If you want particular optical properties or colors, or heat resistance, or strength then it's a very different story.
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Recyling glass bottles is actually pretty easy with two caveats:
Colour sorting. You need to sort by colour. Hardware to do that has existed for many decades. But it requires significant initial investment, which in turn requires a stable input of bottles.
Cleanliness. You need to have smell detectors. Hardware for this has also existed for many decades, but requires significant initial investment and stable input of bottles to be viable.
Real problem? It's cheaper to recycle PET bottles. Instead of all that i
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Those are a sort of "mimimum requirement" to get beyond glass bricks. But you'll still get different batches with different optical properties, different strengths, and different responses to heat.
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Greasy cardboard can easily be "recycled" into compost that can fertilize trees to make more cardboard.
Glass? (Score:2)
All of which just feeds into your larger point: what is 'recyclable' or not is mostly a question of who's buying the stuff, and whether they can economically make use of it. A number of municipalities in my region stopped accepting glass for recycling - glass! - because the market for it tanked a few years back. Nevermind that recycling glass is technologically easy, and that virgin glass is very energy intensive to make. But that, too, is changing as domestic recyclers ramp up capacity to make use of it.
My city (indeed most of my state) does not allow glass in our curbside recycling because of the risk of someone getting hurt from the shards. However, we can take glass to dedicated facilities.
We do need to remember to prioritize our efforts. Reduce the waste we produce. Cut back on packaging, for example. Reuse where possible. Brazil still does bottle exchanges, for example. Use empty grocery bags to line your small baggage bins. See if anyone needs your cardboard boxes for moving. Recycle what can be rec
Isn't that the same thing? (Score:2)
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In theory pizza box are just paper and so recyclable... but dirty pizza box aren't recyclable, the oil and food will contaminate the other clean papers.
You can cut out the dirty parts and throw them in the normal trash, while sending the clean parts (only clean paper, not oil stained) to recycle... i do this... but trusting everyone to do that is another story (many people do not even empty containers or remove the caps) and that is why many simply reject pizza boxes
If you take the trouble of manually cutti
California has a lot of stupid laws. (Score:5, Insightful)
California often goes overboard with its laws, however this makes sense.
Part of the cost to recycling is the amount of crap that you cannot recycle. If you have a single stream recycling service for your home, you may often just toss anything with that recycling symbol into the bin, only to make your rubbish bill much higher, because they are going to take a lot of what you thought would go back into making a new product, actually is just filling the landfill.
If you don't care about the environment and will just want to toss out everything in the main garbage, then fine be that way, I may disagree with your stance, but that is outside the issue. If you want to make better choices that have a smaller impact of the environment then you should have useful information that will lead you to make the better decision.
We are given so much misinformation, because it is often some sort of marketing ploy that much of our decisions that we make are poor, not because we are trying to do harm, but because we cannot get a good information to help us choose the best options for us.
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Quite some time ago, in a different career, I was an inspector for hazmat. The agency I worked for got a call from a local recycling facility about something suspicious.
Turns out it was medical waste dumped in with the recyclables.
Unfortunately, the recycling facility was merely a holding place before it all went to the landfill as at the time, the State had allocated funding to create a recycling center (one) but didn't actually allocate any funds to *recycle* what was picked up, so while everyone was duti
Why was this ever allowed in the first place. (Score:3)
"What a lot of shoppers might not know is that any product can display the sign, even if it isn't recyclable."
And who exactly was the moron who thought that stupid shit was a good idea?
From deceiving "green" consumers to clogging up recycling centers with non-recyclable material to simply costing manufacturers more money (it costs something to include a step where you stamp/mold/print a recycling symbol in every single product coming off the line), this was a completely preventable problem that should have been addressed with common sense decades ago.
Guess we should get used to jobs being created from preventable idiocy and senseless corruption, but that is the future we face now with too many humans and not enough jobs. Gotta have jobs, so gotta find ways to manufacture more.
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The idea that the article claims that it's completely legal to lie about products sold just shows how little power the FTC has these days.
Part of the product lifecycle is disposal, so lying to the consumer before purchase is fraud. Fraud that pushes liability back to the manufacturer when their claims turn out to be false.
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"What a lot of shoppers might not know is that any product can display the sign, even if it isn't recyclable."
And who exactly was the moron who thought that stupid shit was a good idea?
Uh, the symbol-with-number format was developed by the Society of Plastics Institute. Then they lobbied state governments to adopt those codes. This wasn't the work of a moron, it was the work of clever people.
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"What a lot of shoppers might not know is that any product can display the sign, even if it isn't recyclable."
And who exactly was the moron who thought that stupid shit was a good idea?
Uh, the symbol-with-number format was developed by the Society of Plastics Institute. Then they lobbied state governments to adopt those codes. This wasn't the work of a moron, it was the work of clever people.
"Clever" people who clearly don't understand human behavior.
Even IF the city waste programs and recycling plants actually adopted this number schema (which they essentially didn't), what in the fuck made the "Plastic Society" assume that citizens would give a shit enough to take the time and effort to sort their garbage by that? Took the general society decades just to get people to stop randomly throwing their garbage out the car window.
Morons.
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More to be done (Score:3)
And then there's styrofoam, which is recyclable but isn't taken anywhere. In Washington, you can take it to a facility to drop off. In CA ??
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And styrofoam is only one form of #6 plastic. Those red party cups are the same plastic, minus the air. People throw those in recycle bins all the time despite not being accepted most places.
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Well, another problem is the number is often so obscure it's unreadable without a magnifying lens and a contrast enhancing light. (I.e., not just enough light to read it by, but another light with a different color at the correct angle to cast shadows when the bloody embossed marker is transparent.)
But yeah, even when you can read the number, that still doesn't tell you whether it's recyclable. Where I live gallon milk containers are recyclable, but their caps aren't. And smaller plastic bottles aren't.
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Part of the problem is that most recycling in the USA is single stream. Recycling is much cheaper when it has already been sorted, caps removed, etc. And so when you have to pay workers to do the same work, a lot of recycling becomes economically infeasible.
So one solution is to switch from single stream recycling to multiple streams. But can you imagine the backlash from homeowners who previously had a recycling barrel but now have to carry their recyclables to the sorting center at the end of the street?
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And each type of recyclable waste piles up at your home for weeks until it's their turn to be hauled away. A uniquely American solution.
Maybe. Does recycling like that actually reduce trash going into the landfill, or does having a separate bin for recycling encoura
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How is this uniquely American? Every other week they pick up those types of recycling from a specific bin. Helps split up the streams and results in lower rates of rejection, and since it's all done with home pickup, compliance rates are fairly high compared to dropoff methods.
Only now? (Score:4)
'Legislation is pending in New York that would, among other things, ban products from displaying misleading claims.'
Really? Only now?
Make THEM recycle it. (Score:2)
Law should state that if they put the recycling symbol on it but it is not recyclable, then it automatically means that 5 cents of the purchase price is a returnable deposit. They now owe the state 5 cents per unit sold.
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Law should state that if they put the recycling symbol on it but it is not recyclable, then it automatically means that 5 cents of the purchase price is a returnable deposit. They now owe the state 5 cents per unit sold.
Thing is what is recyclable varies greatly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Most containers are not manufactured in the places they are actually used, often they are made for national or even international markets. So should the manufacturers go with a best case or worst case scenario for recyclability? I'm thinking packing goods differently everywhere is simply not going to be very practical.
True or partly true? (Score:2)
So are these things really not recyclable or is just a matter of it's too expensive to recycle them?
90% of what goes in the Blue bin goes to landfill (Score:2)
Devious marketing is hard to battle (Score:5, Informative)
According to the American Chemical Society, bets are being placed on making recycling profitable, but that's still a long ways away.
https://cen.acs.org/environmen... [acs.org]
According to a consortium of journalists, the biggest problem is that the plastics industry deliberately created the recycling process as a ruse to increase acceptance of plastics. The biggest tactic was making the plastic type indicator symbol--the triangle with arrows--look like the recycling sympbol. They are different. The number inside this triangle simply tells you what type of plastic you're holding. Only numbers 1 and 2--polyethyleneterephthalate and high density polytethylene--are produced in large enough quantities to be recycled profitably. The rest is dumped into the ocean by the poor recycling countries, usually India and Indonesia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
The fact that plastics feedstocks--natural gas and petroleum--are so cheap right now doesn't help. It's quite a conundrum, and industry marketing savvy makes progress rather difficult. It is very good that California is the first to step up, as usual. The industry's misleading marketing campaign must be altered.
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Thanks for the explanations. (I've never received mod points so can't mod you up, but wanted to express appreciation.)
Re: Devious marketing is hard to battle (Score:2)
Youâ(TM)re welcome. It is important to cut through the crap.
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Plastic recycling is real, easy and decently profitable. The problem isn't with "omg corporations" but with end users. To recycle plastic, it must be clean.
Now try selling your average housewife on having to wash every single use plastic container before she tosses it into the recycling bin. That is the reason why most of the plastic trash ends up being not recyclable. Not the mystical "corporate evildoers".
And it's that dirty plastic that recyclers don't want that ends up dumped across Asia. Wash it, and t
Re: Devious marketing is hard to battle (Score:2)
Simply not true.
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Except there is the grease, and often some stuck on cheese. Some places take them, some don't. How much is OK is hard to quantify.
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A conspiracy theory! I love those. Did you know the frogs are turning gay?
While a frogs sex can change spontaneously the changes are usually caused by pollution interfering with hormones. Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to pollution as they can sort of breath thru their skin.
I guess nobody knows what those logos mean (Score:2)
Those logos have codes so that you can put them in the right bin. They tell you what kind of glass/plastic/metal/etc the object is made out of so that it can be sorted appropriately.
Whether or not you should be putting it in your recyclables bin depends entirely on your local facilities.
This needs a public information campaign, not a new law. Put big stickers on the recycling bins with the codes of the items your city accepts or something.
This will likely only make it more difficult to open new materials re
What my argument would be as their lawyer (Score:2)
There's no false advertising. Everything is recyclable if you're willing to wait long enough.
'convention now bans most trade in plastic waste' (Score:2)
More on topic, it'a about time those symbols actually meant something.
The environmentalists created this problem (Score:2)
The problem of garbage in the recycle bin was created by the environmentalists years ago. They over pushed recycling. There were numerous examples of local governments searching people's trash bins for recyclable items. Of cameras on garbage trucks monitoring what got dumped from garbage cans. Of fines for not recycling certain items. On top of that, municipal garbage cans have been shrunk and fees for being overfilled increased. All the while the recycle bins were made larger and no fees added for be
Keep America Beautiful.... (Score:2)
I'll just leave this here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Yo Grark
Re: Everything is recyclable (Score:2)
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Even Gavin Newsom?
What flavor of Soylent Green would he be? Toasted street shit with almond sprinkles?
Would make for some interesting wine and cheese pairings.
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...and energy input.
Re:Wrong goal (Score:5, Insightful)
You should prove that the material is actually recyclable
More than that, you should prove that recycling the material results in a product that can be sold for more than the cost of the recycling process.
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Not really no. Externalities have a cost and that cost can be socially distributed. No one makes a profit by preventing you shitting in your own back yard, but sewage is provided as a social service for a functioning modern city precisely because of benefits that have nothing to do with profit.
If recycling costs more, so be it. Socialise it, raise taxes on corporations to pay for it.
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Who pays the cost and who benefits is irrelevant to the point I am making. Its ironic that shitting in your own back yard is a great example for what I am talking about. Millions of homes in the US have their own well and septic because providing sewage as a city service would be too costly, even though it is technically possible.
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California may soon be running out of things to ban.
It's funny because it's true. - Homer Simpson