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Is Plastic Recycling a Myth? (nasdaq.com) 290

Last week California's Attorney General accused the fossil fuel/petrochemical industries of "perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics crisis," Reuters reports, and even launched an investigation into their role in "causing and exacerbating the global plastics pollution crisis."

And meanwhile, "The rate of plastic waste recycling in the United States fell to between 5%-6% in 2021, as some countries stopped accepting U.S. waste exports and as plastic waste generation surged to new highs, according to a report released on Wednesday." The report by environmental groups Last Beach Clean Up and Beyond Plastics shows the recycling rate has dropped from 8.7% in 2018, the last time the Environmental Protection Agency published recycling figures. The decline coincides with a sharp drop in plastic waste exports, which had counted as recycled plastic.... "The U.S. must take responsibility for managing its own plastic waste," said the report, which used 2018 EPA, 2021 export and recent industry data to estimate the 2021 recycling rate.....

"Recycling does not work, it never will work, and no amount of false advertising will change that," said report author Judith Enck [a former regional administrator at America's Environmental Protection Agency].

One sustainability site now even calls plastic recycling "a diversionary tactic preventing us from finding real solutions to our waste crisis," agreeing that it's being pushed by the plastics industry in "a clever, yet green-washed, ploy to maintain production by perpetuating a myth that all this plastic is destroyed. The sad truth is that it's not...."

"[T]he real problem is the ever-increasing amount of STUFF, particularly single-use plastic stuff, that's produced, consumed briefly, and then added to existing colossal piles of trash. Recycling can't solve this problem."

Or, as Cory Doctorow put it recently, "Recycling is puffery. Which is to say, recyling is bullshit...." In 1973, Exxon researchers told the company that there was no feasible way to recycle plastics, and that there likely never would be. Exxon sprang into action! They created a puffery campaign! They lobbied state legislatures to mandate the use of the recycling logo, three arrows pointing at each other, telling us that plastic was part of a new, "circular" economy. Oil is made into plastic, plastic is used, plastic is recycled. Everybody wins!

We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the link...
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Is Plastic Recycling a Myth?

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  • by Asynchronously ( 7341348 ) on Saturday May 07, 2022 @10:50PM (#62513160)

    Penn & Teller had a Bullshit episode about recycling years ago. It still holds true today.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @12:17AM (#62513254)
      John Oliver just did one too. It's kind of frustrating that about the only place you can go to in our modern pro corporate media for any sort of actual truth or comedians and a handful of YouTubers
    • Yep. It costs nothing for CocaCola to print "please recycle me!" on their bottles and place the onus on us.

      The question is: How many products does CocaCola sell in recycled plastic?

      Until these companies use recycled plastic in their packaging then it's all Bullshit.

      • In Europe they are forced to recycle it since decades ...

        • by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @08:23AM (#62513810) Homepage

          Really? I'm not seeing it here in Spain.

          In Germany they refill the bottles. The exact same ones. No "recycling" necessary. When you buy a bottle of soda in Germany you can see it's a bit scratched up from the machines.

          Same goes for pizza, etc. When you order a pizza in Germany they bring it to your house in a metal box and and tip it onto one of your plates for you. No garbage generated.

          • by kackle ( 910159 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @11:20AM (#62514202)

            Really? I'm not seeing it here in Spain.

            In Germany they refill the bottles.

            It used to be that way in the Midwest US when I was younger; I'd guess up until the early 1990s. I think that's the way to go, but I'm sure it's a decision more based on profit, not for the environment.

            I've heard people complain that glass is heavier and increases energy for shipping for recycling, but, if true, I think this higher energy use (getting "greener" all the time) is better than the entire process of creating plastic from scratch, and spreading the resultant chemicals all over the planet.

      • The correct place for the onus of recycling to be is back at the manufacturing plant.

        But in order to push the price of paying for the externalities of their operations onto others, manufacturers pushed a whole campaign in which failures to recycle are your fault, consumer.
  • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Saturday May 07, 2022 @10:52PM (#62513164)
    My parents quit recycling a few years ago in an earlier wave of stories about how recycling is fake. The thing is, aluminum and cardboard really do get recycled. (At least industrial streams. I don't know how to check up on household recycling in different areas.)

    I also think incineration should count as recycling if it is offsetting additional fossil fuels being pumped from the ground.

    • Post-consumer cardboard is rarely recycled; the contamination factor is too high.

      Where I live about 6-7 years ago they admitted that it is better for them to burn waste (waste to energy) than attempt to recycle it. Sadly even glass was only even barely attempted to be removed from the stream because it clogged the trash burning boiler.

      Landfilling costs are very rarely reported accurately, and a huge part of it is just how much stupid crap we throw away every day. We started composting household waste at h

      • by piojo ( 995934 )

        My friend that works in an adjacent field (more knowledgeable than average but not an expert) says cardboard boxes and mail/letters are high grade materials are the best paper products to recycle.

        Furthermore, in many poorer parts of the world, some people collect used boxes to earn a little money. The fact that they are able to sell it to recyclers is strong proof they are gainfully recycled. Of course this "proof" is region-specific.

      • by piojo ( 995934 )

        And about composting--worms are great for apartment dwellers. A small compost bucket may not get hot enough to work in any reasonable time, and without leaves and leaf clippings it may have too much nitrogen for proper composting. The solution to all these problems is putting worms in the compost bucket. However, DO NOT let them get outside as they are an invasive species that eliminates the organic matter on forest floors. The vermicompost should be used for indoor potted plants only, or for a region that

      • We can't even put the compost to good use!!

        A lot of landfills eventually end up as parks. Just sayin.

      • Burning most consumer plastics releases toxic gasses so far as I remember. Also we need to get away from burning things to generate electricity, it's already gotten us into a mess we may never get out of.
    • by quenda ( 644621 )

      And glass, steel is recycled.
        It's just post-consumer plastic recycling that is a scam.

      • Yep. I'll believe plastic recycling exists when I see bottled water, soda, etc. being sold in recycled plastic bottles.

        Until then it's all lies.

  • by evanh ( 627108 ) on Saturday May 07, 2022 @11:09PM (#62513176)

    Surely we can do our own recycling? Easy way to pay too - If it don't fully bio-degrade then have the makers pay for full recycling costs. Same as with appliance packaging.

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      Because plastics are very heavy on sorting and cleaning if you actually want to recycle them. They're also uneconomical and anti-environmentalist to recycle if you need to do as much as wash them with hot water before recycling them, due to energy costs. I.e. "what is the environmental impact of recycling vs the impact of burning it". Most people forget that recycling also requires significant resources, and if those resources are greater than what you save by recycling, it's the environmentally destructive

      • by evanh ( 627108 )

        All solved easily by the product makers footing the bill. Same as for appliance packaging. No-brainer really.

        • by madbrain ( 11432 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @12:39AM (#62513284) Homepage Journal

          Yes. It would make a lot more sense for recyclers to do the washing at scale with recycled water not necessarily of potable grade, and large solar water heaters, for example, rather than having consumers do it and spend time and their water bill and water heating costs doing so. Especially if 95% of it still isn't going to get recycled.

          • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

            It would make a lot more sense to reuse rather than recycle.
            Years ago drinks used to come in glass bottles for instance, which you returned to the store to be cleaned and refilled.

            • And in some EU countries you pay a "deposit" for plastic or glass bottles, which you then get back when you return them. The glass bottles are probably washed and reused, plastic bottles are crushed though (but it better be in perfect condition when you return it).

              Interesting in that at least in my country, nobody wants glass jars. You can throw them in a glass waste container to be recycled, but nobody reuses them.

              • Depends on the plastic bottle, aka vendor.
                If they are very thin plastic, the plastic is melted and recycled.
                Thick bottles are treated like glass bottles: cleaned and reused several times before they get recycled. (You see that on the "usage marks" on the surface of the bottles)

            • by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @09:39AM (#62513990)

              I used to think like this until I read the explanation on my nation's bottling recycling authority, which shifted from glass to PET bottles about two decades ago. They actually explained why in great detail, and it was a decision to consume less environmental resources.

              The reason here is the total consumption of each recycling process. Reusing glass bottles is actually very complex. You need to clean them to such a degree that whatever residue is left is completely gone. Washing them is in fact a very energy intensive process, which uses a fairly significant amount of heated water at high pressure. Other costs are extensive scanning hardware which does everything from optical to smell testing to figure out if bottle is clean enough, fairly high loss rate due to breakage as glass tends to shatter, and finally weight that needs to be transported around when shipping empty bottles to be washed.

              PET bottles are simply crushed, melted, pelletised and reformulated into the same bottles, which means they require much less weight and volume carrying ability for empties, require less energy to be remade than it takes to wash glass bottles thoroughly enough for them to be reused (water is much more energy dense compared to PET and there's a lot less PET than water in the recycling process by volume per bottle), and are lighter in transport at every following stage. Finally, they break much less, which results in less waste while in the hands of the customer.

              So using glass bottles in a well functioning recycling system that gets >90% of all bottles back to recycle is more environmentally damaging than using PET bottles.

  • We, by and large, did not actually wash or sort the plastic to be recycled, and that's the primary reason China cited for no longer accepting it from us.

    • If we did all of the hard work ourselves, then we would not have had to send it all to somewhere with cheap labor.
      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        If you did all the hard work yourself when it comes to recycling plastics, it would likely be more destructive to environment than simply burning it. Remember that recycling processes also require things like energy to happen.

  • by GotNoRice ( 7207988 ) on Saturday May 07, 2022 @11:22PM (#62513194)
    Go and watch the "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" episode about Recycling. Their conclusion was basically that Metal recycling is VERY effective, Glass recycling was pointless (but at least it kept trash off the street), and Plastic recycling was borderline at best (can be recycled a few times, but not economically, and with reduced quality each time). These guys are VERY liberal, but not afraid to call BS when they see it.
    • by dohzer ( 867770 )

      When I volunteered for a few garbage collection dives while on a holiday, they always told us to collect the plastic and metal trash, but leave the glass bottles because:
      1. They're heavy, and you're better off spending your energy collecting as much plastic/metal/etc as possible.
      2. Glass bottles turn back into "sand" in the long run anyway.

      These guys are VERY liberal and not afraid to call BS when they see it.

      Fixed that for you.

      • In my country, when you buy a drink that comes in a glass or plastic bottle, you have to pay 0.1EUR "deposit" for it. When you return the bottle, you get the money back (plastic bottles are crushed, while I think glass bottles are reused). This dramatically reduced the amount of trash on the streets - even if you do not care about the 0.1EUR, someone poor can earn money by picking up all the intact bottles.

  • Recycling is hard. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Saturday May 07, 2022 @11:29PM (#62513206) Homepage

    Plastics can be recycled, but it's a hard problem. For recycling to be feasible, discarded items need to be both clean and sorted by the type of plastic they're composed of. Clean in this case means that all non-plastic debris has been removed. That covers not just washing off food residue but also removing the cardboard inserts from plastic packaging. Since very very few consumers bother cleaning their plastic items before discarding them, the recyclers would have to bear that cost and it's non-trivial for the volumes they deal with. Consumers also don't sort plastics by type, another cost the recyclers have to bear. Combined those costs are enough to make it just not profitable to handle plastics for recycling.

    On top of that, there's bulk vs. weight. Most plastic items have a lot of empty interior volume. It takes up much more room in collection bins than it's weight would suggest it should, which makes it expensive to collect compared to it's value. Some common forms, like expanded polystyrene, are even worse to the point where, despite polystyrene being a very high-value plastic for recyclers, it's just not worth it to collect and compact it.

    If we want plastics recycling to actually work, we need some sort of process that can take in unsorted, dirty/contaminated plastic and turn it into clean, compacted material either of a single type or automatically sorted by type, and which can be scaled down to the point where it can be installed in a home or business. There's lots of processes that can handle reducing plastics to basic hydrocarbons and that can deal with the waste products (for instance cardboard contains enough carbon that the right process can convert those cardboard inserts into the same hydrocarbons it's going to reduce the plastics to, reducing the waste stream in the process). Getting them to fit in a small enough package for a home at a price people can afford is the problem they haven't solved yet (mainly, I think, because it wouldn't benefit the big oil companies who're the owners of the big manufacturers of raw plastics).

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @12:21AM (#62513256)
      And not systems. You've been conditioned to put all the responsibility on the consumer and none of it on the business. So you aren't thinking about things like packaging that's designed to be recycled and therefore would be convenient to be washed. Let alone something like reusable bottles. I mean I have plenty of plastic cups I keep around the house, there's absolutely no reason why the soda I buy couldn't come in a reusable plastic cup that I returned to the store after washing. People say we can't do that like we used to with glass cuz glass is too heavy but there's no reason we can't do it with plastic.

      Again the problem is we've all been conditioned to think first and foremost about individuals and not about the community as a whole and the businesses operating in that community. We're not thinking about externalized costs because we're not supposed to think about externalized costs. Otherwise the companies couldn't externalize those costs on to us like they have been doing for decades the great success and profit
      • A better solution is of course not to drink soda at all, which solves all the bottle recycling problems, along with many others. But since that'll never happen, perhaps having standardized refillable containers, like we already do for things like small propane tanks, makes sense.

        Now, back to my Pinot Grigoo that was bottled in Italy in a glass bottle, not made of plastic, which I'm sure poses no recycling problems whatsoever.

      • by Todd Knarr ( 15451 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @03:04AM (#62513436) Homepage

        That's a completely different problem, however. You're talking about "How do we reduce the amount of stuff we need to recycle?" rather than "How do we make recycling feasible?". IMO your approach is a better one, making things more reusable so we don't need to recycle as much.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by WierdUncle ( 6807634 )

        You've been conditioned to put all the responsibility on the consumer and none of it on the business.

        Actually, my analysis is the opposite. Businesses largely supply what people want, or they won't stay in business. If people want to buy stuff in fancy packaging, which they discard in the trash, then that is what suppliers will provide. There is some evidence that supermarkets are offering greener packaging, using cardboard instead of plastic, for example, but that is in response to what consumers, such as me, want to buy.

        The problem very much comes down to the consumer. There was obviously considerable su

        • by GBH ( 142968 )

          This is grossly simplistic.

          Consumers make choices for many reasons depending on the consumer. Some have no choice and buy the cheapest version of whatever they need/want. Others chose for aesthetics or brand. Others choose based on taste. Others choose on availability. Many, if not most choose based on advertising or propaganda.

          For this reason sometimes you need to force users (and producers) to make the right choice because few of those lead you to what's best for society or the world in general.

          Yes you're

        • they give people what makes the most money. It's a subtle but real difference. Inferior products win out in the market all the time due to better marketing or backdoor deals or anti-trust violations or all sorts of nasty things.

          Obviously there's the reality that consumers don't have all the information they need to make the best purchasing decisions, and advertising tries to muddy those waters.

          Also, do some more reading on "externalized costs". The concept is that companies products cost their consu
    • by xonen ( 774419 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @01:52AM (#62513348) Journal

      Plastics can be recycled

      In my country, there's a sort-of working plastic recycling network. Multiple containers in each town to dispose your plastic. 'Clear' instructions which plastics are allowed and which not ('clear' because the list is so long, it's not clear at all).

      The result? People indeed collect bin-bags full of plastics. A full bag weighs about 200-300 gram (half a pound). Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's ever contained in that bag.

      Of course, this example is a bit over the top, and a lot of people walk or bicycle to recycle their plastics, but I've seen people doing it and then praising themselves for being so environmentally aware.

      To me, the biggest challenge is not to recycle per-se, but to avoid plastic litter in our environment and oceans. That'd be a big win already. Daily life shows people are and stay ignorant as our town is being littered by plastic daily, and no amount of recycling won't solve that issue.

      The best option is to simple reduce the use of plastics. As in, alternative packaging.

      • The result? People indeed collect bin-bags full of plastics. A full bag weighs about 200-300 gram (half a pound). Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's ever contained in that bag.

        Then the collection point is in a bad location. Either such points need to be close to where people live or they need to be close to stores (so that you can take the trash for recycling when you go shopping and would burn the fuel anyway).

      • Then, in order to save the environment, people get in their car and drive a few km to recycle it. By doing so wasting more energy on fuel than that's ever contained in that bag.
        That is nonsense. Considering the people would drive there anyway and buy some stuff. Why can they not take the plastic with them and hand it back for recycling?

    • Plastics can be recycled, but it's a hard problem. For recycling to be feasible, discarded items need to be both clean and sorted by the type of plastic they're composed of.

      This sorting is damn near impossible, even if consumers carefully sort plastic items into a separate waste container. You can't just melt it all down to make new plastic, unlike metals, for example. I came across this incompatible melting down with a product I designed, that had a fitting friction/melt welded to a plastic tube. The tube was polypropylene, and for the weld to work, the fitting had to be the same type of plastic. Unfortunately, the prototype was made of polyethylene by mistake, and the weld d

    • Getting them to fit in a small enough package for a home at a price people can afford is the problem they haven't solved yet.

      Wouldn't doing it in an industrial scale be more economical or efficient?

  • by kmoser ( 1469707 ) on Saturday May 07, 2022 @11:37PM (#62513210)

    We — the "consumers" (ugh) — bought it. We bought the plastic, sure, but we bought the puffery, too. We sorted our plastic, washed it, set it out on the curb. 90% of it was never recycled. 90% of it never will be.

    "We" didn't buy the puffery. Idiots in government bought the puffery and made laws that started the recycling industry to which we now are obligated to contribute.

  • by ET3D ( 1169851 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @12:30AM (#62513270)

    The problem with the articles linked is that they have no actual data or science. The only important fact I learned was that exporting plastics counted as recycling in the US, which is of course a stupid practice and shouldn't have happened.

    So the first question is, does any of the recycling actually work? That 5-6% figure, does it have any actual recycling? If it does, what makes that particular recycling work? Can this recycling be extended to more plastic products? Because even if just half of that is true recycling it means billions of tons of plastic are recycled per year.

    The second question is, can recycling become better? I often see science articles about plastic-eating bacteria and their potential to quickly decompose plastics. It suggests that there are solutions on the way, that recycling can become better.

    tl;dr: Plastic recycling might currently not work or is far from sufficient, but if it can be made better, then that's a good direction to push for.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @03:00AM (#62513430)

      Yes and yes. Just focusing on the extreme failings of the USA doesn't make the problem itself unsolvable.

      Many countries do far better with plastic recycling. Even the previous "root of all evil" company covered here on Slashdot in the last plastic article provides Coke here in 100% recycled plastic bottles reprocessed here in Western Europe, collected here in Western Europe.

      Plastic recycling can work just fine if you:
      a) get people on board (expecting people to go out of their way to recycle is hard, telling people to read labels carefully is hard, it needs to be easy)
      b) put the necessary infrastructure in place (telling someone to walk around looking for a recycling bin is hard, throwing it in the trash and building / operating trash sorting facilities is easy)
      c) put the correct incentives in place for companies to use recycled plastic (they will otherwise gravitate to the cheapest option)

    • does any of the recycling actually work?

      My analysis, based on polymer chemistry and some dealings with the plastic moulding industry, is that there is very little scope for melting down discarded plastic to make new plastic items. If there is any impurity in the input, the result is useless.

      It is worth contrasting this with how materials are recycled when an office building is demolished. I love a good demolition. First, the electrical and network cabling are stripped, and that stuff is valuable for its copper content. There may be some aluminium

  • Build incinerators. Reclaim the energy and metals from your trash, destroy all those nasty chemicals.

    Stuffing all your trash in a hole, leaving a time bomb for future generations to deal with is...trashy.

  • It's a simple process to pressure cook plastic waste back into fuel and oil.

  • The more plastic is not recycled and buried, the more oil would have to be converted into plastic instead of CO2-ing up the atmosphere by becoming fuel. Think of it as carbon sequestration.

    • ...carbon sequestration that's killing off the oceans and turning the entire planet into a pile of trash.

      (just so we can drink water that's transported thousands of miles in tiny bottles and don't have to remember to take bags with us when we go shopping)

  • by lkcl ( 517947 ) <lkcl@lkcl.net> on Sunday May 08, 2022 @02:08AM (#62513370) Homepage

    https://www.plasticsnews.com/a... [plasticsnews.com]

    i spent an entire day touring the centre in taipei, in absolute awe of the committment these people have to recycling.

    because many taiwanese people are short they could not get safety shoes in small sizes, to protect themselves during humanitarian crises after hurricanes or earthquakes, so Da Ai Technology *designed and manufactured* puncture-resistant safety shoes for their volunteers.

    PET bottles were assembled into tables and chairs for use as temporary furniture for refugees.

    disaster relief blankets were spun from recycled PET.

    recycling is done by hand entirely by volunteers, these are people who would otherwise be sitting at home in front of TV, stressing out and ending up dying of some "Western" style sedentary-induced ailment. volunteers feed the elderly volunteers a decent meal, basically keeping them alive by giving them company and purpose.

    the quality of the recycled plastics, because it is sorted by hand, is so high that Gernan manufacturers actually prefer to source from the Da Ai Technology company than buy "new" from other places.

    60% recycling in Taiwan, the highest in the world. waste food goes to farmers to feed pigs. plastics, metal and paper goes to Da Ai Centres: elderly and disabled volunteers sit there cutting out the white bits from the black bits, because the white bits need less bleaching.

    you think "bullshit" on the whole western idea of not properly recycling? the bullshit goes *far* deeper: a laziness and total lack of responsibility that is symptomatic of the entire Western society and way of thinking, and I include myself in that - a British Citizen - just as much as America.

    Britain has the worst recycling and highest consumption of plastic-wrapped "meals" in the world; America is 1/8th the world's population yet consumes 50% of the world's resources. 30 years ago i used to think Communists were bullshit-peddling propaganda with phrases "Decadence of the West". not any more. we have so much to answer for, it's unreal.

    • : a laziness and total lack of responsibility that is symptomatic of the entire Western society and way of thinking, and I include myself in that - a British Citizen - just as much as America.

      Yes, but you won't change people. However, you can design a system that does not ignore human nature. Since I am not willing to work for free, I would rather pay (as tax on the item or whatever) for it. Probably the best way to do it would be to make the manufacturers pay for the recycling of the product (and packaging). Yes, they would push the costs down to the consumer, however, it would also incentivize them to make the product and packaging easier and cheaper to recycle (use some slightly more expensiv

  • I seen it being chopped up to bits and mixed with some sort of epoxy and pressed into bricks like paving stones

    I bet it can be used in many ways that dont harm the environment
  • ... which is to say that plastics degrade when being recycled. Molecule chains break and impurities reduce the mechanical properties of the resulting material to the point that one single bottle of PLA in a million PET bottles will make the result unusable.

    But there are ways of making recycling work. Use HDPE (which is almost always processed via blow molding, so all HDPE in the waste stream has very similar properties) and sort it by color, as is being done by Envision Plastics [envisionplastics.com]. The result is a purity of

  • I have been saying this for a while. Plastics should go into a landfill. Somewhere away, possibly in a desert, and buried for the next thousand years.

    Basically:
    - Glass
    - Metal
    - Paper
    can be recycled. And with ease (and no, those greasy pizza boxes cannot be recycled. They contaminate other clean batches, don't)

    Food:
    Should be burned or composted. Either, we should prevent methane, could potentially use the compost, or the heat energy to actually run recycling plants.

    Anything else:
    Landfill. It is a downer, but

  • by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @03:25AM (#62513472)
    We have to constantly increase our consumption to feed capitalism or it will fail. More disposables! More planned obsolescence!
  • A lot of the case against plastic is that it accumulates. A lot of the case FOR plastics is that it's cheaper (meaning less costly (=energy intensive) to manufacture and transport).

    Then, which is an easier problem to solve? CO2 accumulating in the environment and warming the earth, or little bits of plastic everywhere? Which is easier to deal with?

  • Yes and no (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @04:24AM (#62513552)
    Plastic can be reused and it can be recycled. The problem is thinking that you can leave it to the free market or individual consciences to make happen, you can't. It needs to happen through imposition of laws that discourage single use plastics and make reuse/recycling the norm and impose fines and financial loss on those who don't abide. From a consumer perspective that means giving them an incentive to recycle by making it less costly than not recycling.

    For example Denmark has laws that beer & soft drinks must be sold in refillable containers and have a return deposit. The deposit for a small bottle of coke would be about 15 cents. It comes in a thick PET bottle that you return when empty to get your deposit back. Supermarkets have machines that collect empty bottles and print out refund slips so people get in the habit of returning their empties when they shop. The bottle is thick enough that it can be reused a number of times before requiring recycling. Denmark also has deposits on single use plastics, glass & metal so they also get returned to the store to be recycled. As a consequence the reuse/recycling rate is over 90%.

    Compare and contrast with somewhere like the US where the recycle rate is something like 30%.

  • by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @04:49AM (#62513588)

    Our local recycle center still takes Plastics #1-4 and 6. No #5 which is unfortunate, but we manage.

    Anyway, point being, some plastic can still be sold to recyclers profitably which is why our local center takes some types of it.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday May 08, 2022 @04:50AM (#62513590)

    In the US.

  • by WierdUncle ( 6807634 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @05:19AM (#62513616)

    What did you actually learn in school? Stupid americans

    I actually learned some chemistry in school, and I am not an American.

    You can melt down plastic to make new stuff, but you can't just chuck all plastics in a melting pot, and expect to get something useful out of the resulting gloop. I did actually try this when I was at school. As I see it, the big problem is segregating the waste. There is possibly some value in processing use-once drinks bottles made from PET, provided that the waste consists only of that material. Chuck in some polythene, and the batch is ruined. This really is different to recycling metals.

  • by JoeSilva ( 215173 ) on Sunday May 08, 2022 @05:43AM (#62513640)

    I tried to just call the company that handles my waste to find out what they do with the Plastic I so carefully prepare by cleaning and removing all but the one type of plastic that is the main container.

    At first the office person said she thinks they just sell it to whoever they can find, when they can. Ever since then they have put me off with promises to call and of course the supervisor is never able to answer ever and never calls.

    I recently dropped off some cardboard and then asked the lady that was there handling drop offs of things like bottles, cans, batteries, misc electronics, etc, and she kept deflecting my questions about where the plastic goes after they handle it. She did mention they have about a hundred people there sorting plastic and then it is compressed into bales.

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Sunday May 08, 2022 @07:39AM (#62513756)

    ... as a means to establish eco-balance. It's basically a scam to make you feel good. Plastic is an awesome material that is cheap to produce, but plastic products should always be produced for longevity, not throw-away. If humanity would change that little detail alone it would have a notable impact on our ecological footprint.

Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.

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