How the Recycling Symbol Lost Its Meaning (grist.org) 90
The iconic recycling symbol, invented 20 years before Earth Day 1990, has become omnipresent on products, often misleading consumers about what can be recycled, according to experts cited in a story explored by Grist. The chasing arrows logo, which promises rebirth for discarded materials, is frequently plastered on items that are not recyclable, particularly plastic products. Confusion over recycling rules has led to contamination at recycling facilities, driving up costs for cities. Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets recycled, with much of the rest ending up in landfills or incinerators.
Environmental groups have called plastic recycling a "false solution." The trouble began in the 1970s when corporations, facing pressure to address litter, embraced recycling as a way to shift responsibility for waste onto individuals and local governments. The plastics industry introduced a resin code system in 1988, surrounding numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the impression that all plastics could be recycled. Despite industry efforts to promote recycling, experts say fulfilling the "urgent need to recycle" has proven difficult and unprofitable. The result is a lack of markets for most recycled plastics, with only 9 percent of all plastics ever produced having been recycled.
Environmental groups have called plastic recycling a "false solution." The trouble began in the 1970s when corporations, facing pressure to address litter, embraced recycling as a way to shift responsibility for waste onto individuals and local governments. The plastics industry introduced a resin code system in 1988, surrounding numbers with the chasing arrows logo, giving the impression that all plastics could be recycled. Despite industry efforts to promote recycling, experts say fulfilling the "urgent need to recycle" has proven difficult and unprofitable. The result is a lack of markets for most recycled plastics, with only 9 percent of all plastics ever produced having been recycled.
Only became a problem when... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only became a problem when... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If you burry a phone book in the soil in your garden.
You can dig it out 10 years later, and the core is still intact. Unless you live in an termite infested area.
If you take a phone book, pour gasoline over it and burn it. It burns until the gasoline is gone and the outer parts are turned to coal and ash, the inner part will be untouched.
Rather old news, this one (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we read about the basic mechanism of how that works decades ago.
https://www.orwellfoundation.c... [orwellfoundation.com]
Since it is costly to deal with the negative externalities of excess waste, and yet it is desirable to have an image of a "green" actor, everyone will go for the cheapest way, which is twist the meaning of any "green" symbols so that the image is there regardless of the behaviour.
News at eleven.
The entire thing was always a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this forum is mostly full of Gen xers and I know we all grew up seeing who framed Roger rabbit. This is not a new technique. When you have hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars at stake you're going to have CEOs figure out if there is competition in the form of better solutions and take steps to shut those down rather than try to compete with them...
Like Gore Vidal used to say, I'm not a conspiracy theorist I'm a conspiracy analyst.
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and like how Elon musk got caught making up a fake public transit company called hyperloop using an already discredited technology so he could shut down high speed rail.
Jesus, this again? High speed rail was effed up years before hyperloop (a stupid idea) came along. But you guys go ahead and keep blaming Musk if that makes you feel better.
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and like how Elon musk got caught making up a fake public transit company called hyperloop using an already discredited technology so he could shut down high speed rail.
Jesus, this again? High speed rail was effed up years before hyperloop (a stupid idea) came along. But you guys go ahead and keep blaming Musk if that makes you feel better.
CA was moving ahead with it but Napoelon Bonapartheid wasn't having it
https://x.com/parismarx/status... [x.com]
Not just Muskrat (Score:3)
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He had help from an Airline CEO. They're in on it too since high speed rail is often *faster* than planes since you don't spend 6 hours waiting to get on and off.
That is the case now, but if passenger railroads threaten the airline industry, then DHS will step in to make sure that boarding a train takes just as long as boarding an aircraft.
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“Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can’t take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla,” he wrote.
This lame 'Hyperloop was vaporware to kill high-speed rail' trope needs to just die. It isn't true.
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Now I do question the notion that his goal was to kill high speed rail, I think it's more likely that his goal was simple self-aggrandizement. Someth
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Musk doesn't seem to care about any form of mass transit that doesn't involve launching for Mars although he went from saying in 2016 the trip would be fun, have games & movies but dialing that all the way back to "it'll cramped, dangerous & you'll probably die" some years later.
That aside, for the same amount of battery capacity guesstimated in a Tesla Semi - originally supposed to cost $150-250k but all pricing has disappeared from the website - he make 2-3 Tesla Buses and have a far higher profit
Re:The entire thing was always a scam (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in recycling these days.
It's not entirely a scam, and recycling does happen, including plastics, but only some of it. Certainly am awful lot goes to landfill and incineration. If you can separate our good quality clear PET or HDPE to about 99% by weight, it's quite valuable per tonne, and you can sell it.
There is definitely a lot of scamming going on.
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Was going to say this. Here in Oregon we've had a bottle bill for decades, and PET bottles for beverages have a deposit on them, which you get back when you turn it in at a bottle drop. This has the effect of keeping these actually valuable and reusable plastics from getting mixed with all the other shit that just gets landfilled or "recycled" in the different colored wheelie bin that goes to a sorting facility... before likely being landfilled separately from the rest of the municipal waste.
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Certainly am awful lot goes to landfill and incineration.
I don't mind incineration, as long as it's done with consideration for the flue gases. Burning plastic for energy is surely better than just burying it in a hole (or chucking on the side of the freeway, or letting it into rivers and then the ocean)
Another option could be thermal depolymerisation or so-called "plastic to oil." I seem to remember that the break-even price for this to compete with oil dug out of the ground was about $100 a barrel.
But yeah, all of these are "downcycling," turning the plastic in
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The notion that we can turn old plastic into pristine, shiny new plastic is false and needs to die.
That depends on the plastic. Thermoplasts can be recycled endlessly (e.g. PET bottles). Elastomers can easy be recycled into other plastics. The hard or not recycle able plastics are duroplasts, like wall outlets or light switches etc.
99% of plastic used in food distribution: can indeed be recycled without degration, if there is no contamination with other plastics.
You can not sell food in the EU in plastic co
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There are only two way outs for plastic:
a) We stop making plastic, in all forms (the cherry on top is that finding "microplastics in mens testicles" and other organs just proves how bad the plastic problem is)
b) We make plastic supremely indestructible (Eg better than glass or metal) so that it can't shed ANY particles. Which means that we need less of it.
Have you tried to handle a water bottle lately? the plastic is so cheap and soft that the cap fill fly off, or it will get punctured if you even drop it b
Nothing works because it's "unprofitable" ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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>only their immediate costs are relevant
I never said only their immediate costs are relevant. I said only the costs they have to pay, at all, are relevant.
And yet the doctor's office will have complimentary bottles of sunscreen or tobacco gum.
Because the doctor is likely being reimbursed in some way, and free samples help bring in customers for the companies.
A profitable situation is a self-solving one. Humans aren't needed. Your genius input isn't needed. Corpos will line up, nay, fight over space to "solve" it.
When a problem doesn't have free money coming out of it, then there's something to discuss. Then human intervention has to pave a way to solutions.
What?
Carbon tax on oil (Score:2)
Enough of one to roughly double the cost of raw materials for making new plastic.
I recall a Vox explainer saying that even under the best recycling circumstances, plastic from recycled material cost about twice as much as plastic made from virgin oil.
If the plastic manufacturers object to paying the externality cost of their product, fsck them.
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That's silly. Just charge the manufacturer of the plastic item to recycle it.
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But that won't have nearly as many unintended consequences and unforseen economic impact if you specifically target the problem itself, instead of upstream raw components used for not-plastics.
What the hell are you thinking, with your nuance and simplicity?
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Fund new research!!! (Score:2)
Lots of research funding comes from the government, right? Aim some of those dollars where we care about the result, rather than 'tiny incremental improvements we are 99% certain will happen'.
And require that anything found be made public. I'm tired of the government paying to begin something, and a scientist then starting a private company to capitalize on the results (and profits). Monopolizing the knowledge for themselves.
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"Lots of research funding comes from the government, right? Aim some of those dollars where we care about the result, rather than 'tiny incremental improvements we are 99% certain will happen'."
This smacks of confirmation bias. The government funds plenty of both (because proving things that are "obvious" is still important, but that's another discussion.) But only one of these sticks in your craw, and it's easy to generate engagement/readership by publishing the "duh that's so obvious" studies. Show some n
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Nailed the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Nailed the problem: Externalized costs (Score:3)
What may shock everyone is the cost (difference between glass and plastic packaging) when the costs aren't externalized any longer.
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Glass has cost too.
It's heavier, bulkier, breaks, needs to be transported back and washed, etc.
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This is the first article I’ve read that puts the blame on manufacturers, pushing the responsibility into the consumers. The only thing that will produce meaningful change is forcing manufacturers to stop using or severely restrict plastic use.
Except that's not the case at all. It's not manufacturers pushing this. It's largely consumers. You could see the furore when we switched away from plastic spoons, ditched plastic shopping bags, put taxes on single use plastic containers. In the end the manufacturers collectively shrugged while the consumer decried the end of the world, and that their mouths weren't evolved to drink without a plastic straw, or that they can't ever go shopping again, and that all of this is the fault of ${RANDOM_ASIAN_COUTNR
Add a fee to container users. And allow refills. (Score:2)
Money is the simplest way to change behavior. If you want people to use other types of containers (to allow that base material to be used where necessary like medical purposes) then add a fee until alternatives are competitive.
If you want people to reuse? Same solution... Though it'd help to regulate companies to offer refills of existing containers too. Meaning stop shipping tons of tiny bottles, or requiring certain container sizes of each product. Let the customer pay for what they want. We can loo
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Let the customer pay for what they want. We can look up information online (no need to print on the side of a bottle), right?
That mindset is directly counter to how people actually operate, at least in the US and other countries with similar buying habits. I'm not saying you're wrong in desire. It just isn't going to happen until consumers are forced to.
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Sure, that's the job of government, to impose the general will onto markets. But people have to vote for it. You do see it around - bottle deposits, electronic waste depots, etc. We have very high rates of at least getting alcohol returned *for* recycling becuase of well structured deposit plans. But voters have to vote for it. I would say the US has done a much worse job keeping up a wall between private interests and public policy, hence my understanding is it's even harder to see policies like those you
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Late-stage capitalism doesn't work that way. The customer doesn't have a choice, because a handful of megacorps make the majority of the products we buy. They squeeze out any smaller competition and lobby against any laws or regulations that would affect their bottom line. Any extra costs are passed straight through to the customer.
Re: Add a fee to container users. And allow refill (Score:3)
That's because it acquired a moral valence (Score:2)
If it were merely a descriptive symbol, like the size label on a container or the thread size on a box of machine screws, there would be no incentive to try to fake it.
But because a segment of the population has ascribed moral good to the appearance of environmental stewardship, there are plenty of grifters around to sell them organic notebooks, cruelty-free doormats, and "recyclable" condoms and toilet paper.
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Re: That's because it acquired a moral valence (Score:1, Troll)
See, the thrift and the fixin shit instead of tossing it and replacing it with cheap trash...that speaks to me deep down. It's the green religion which starts with Thou Shalt Not Build and whose logical conclusion is to climb back up into the treetops and fling poo at your neighbors...that I'm not getting on board with.
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Too many #5 plastics (Score:3)
Our local recycler only accepts #1 and #2 plastics. Most of what we get is #5.
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#1 and #2 are rigid and used in a lot of plastic bottling. #5 is lighter, cheaper, and is used in some food packaging and/or takeaway containers.
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Yes, I'm sure there are reasons for the other numbers or else they wouldn't exist, but my point is do we really need those? I'd even say that a lot of the plastic containers really should be something else, like paper or AL foil (which recycles nicely).
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It would be better to stick to #1 and #2 everywhere since those are the most-readily recyclable; however, it may be that post consumer plastic winds up as #5 or #6. I'm not really sure on how that process works out.
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This is a large part of the root problem, or so it seems to me. Why are there > 6 types of plastics for packaging and such? Let's take it down to 2 and make everything out of those, then recycling will be a lot more useful.
Not necessarily. #1 is widely used but, at least around here, recycling centres only accept #1 in certain forms. Specifically, they like #1 bottles but pretty much anything else messes with the equipment. Assigning a different number to #1 used in non bottles may help the sorting.
This is also an issue with cardboard (Score:5, Informative)
I had Domino's Pizza delivered last night. "Recycle me" messages were all over the cardboard pizza boxes. At least in my city, our recycling instructions specifically call out pizza boxes as an example of cardboard "soaked in grease" that they can not accept. Unfortunately "recycle" has just become a buzz word used by companies on their products to make consumers feel good about buying them because it doesn't contribute to the trash problem, even though the products and/or their packaging just gets separated out of the recycle stream and thrown in the landfill anyway.
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My city has a citywide composting operation to reduce biowaste going to landfill. They specifically call out pizza boxes as something that can go right into the compost wheelie bin, because it all goes through an industrial shredder. Egg cartons too.
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Interesting. Our compost program will take pizza boxes (and napkins and coffee filters), but not egg cartons. Those are specifically directed to be trashed.
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My municipal government has limited (plastic) bottle recycling and no cardboard/organic recycling. A few local businesses handle batteries and (no CRTs) electronics but it takes time to find them.
Some people, mostly older people, throw their organic (food) waste in the recycling bin: That's their contribution to reducing waste. People don't want to make an effort and corporations want their customers to do all the work, including washing cardboard.
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That's your city. The reality is there are plenty of cardboard recycling places which can deal with grease soaked cardboard. It's not domino's fault that your city has poor recycling. Do you expect them to create a custom box for each city?
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New York City has pizza boxes which are standardized by city statute and are recyclable even when they're greasy, provided there isn't caked-on food like cheese or something stuck to the box.
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A good friend of mine has been in the paper industry for many years now. I've asked him this question specifically about pizza boxes:
When wood fibers get saturated with oil it's not really a big deal because oil is hydrophobic and fiber is recycled and purified through aqueous means i.e. flotation tanks that remove dyes, inks and oils etc. So fear not... that greasy pizza box is 100% loblolly pine with a little smattering of vegetable oil. It would happily be recycled.
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At least in my city, our recycling instructions specifically call out pizza boxes as an example of cardboard "soaked in grease" that they can not accept.
And when the recycling instructions become a booklet, like in my city, I lose interest in memorizing all of the rules and exceptions.
recycling symbol is fine (Score:4, Insightful)
>"Confusion over recycling rules has led to contamination at recycling facilities, driving up costs for cities."
That is not the fault of the recycling symbol.
The symbol is just there to say WHAT TYPE of material it is. That is all. Nearly all materials can [theoretically] be recycled, but it doesn't mean it can be recycled where you live. Here, the only plastics taken are 1 and 2, period. I look at the symbol to determine if it qualifies. My only problem with the symbol is that on some products the number is so small, it is incredibly hard to read.
>"Only around 5 percent of plastic waste in the United States gets recycled, with much of the rest ending up in landfills or incinerators. "
Totally different topic. Has nothing to do with the recycling symbol. I have no control over what happens after I put the correct materials in my curb-side bin, which usually contains much more materials (by volume) than my trash. I *hope* they are actually being recycled, but kinda doubt it.
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nope, there is the "other" symbol which to Joe Sixpack means it can be recycled.
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"That is not the fault of the recycling symbol.
The symbol is just there to say WHAT TYPE of material it is. "
The plastic type symbol is actually NOT the recycling symbol. However, it was specifically designed to be confused with the recycling symbol, which you yourself have just demonstrated.
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>"The plastic type symbol is actually NOT the recycling symbol."
It is the recycle symbol with a number in it (and sometimes the chemical abbreviation below it). Together, it is the recycle symbol for a product. Now, if you are talking about putting a recycle symbol with no number in it, or type of material below/near it (like "paper", "cardboard", "aluminum", "glass", "steel", etc) on a product, then THAT is probably useless and just virtue signaling.
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Nearly all materials can [theoretically] be recycled, but it doesn't mean it can be recycled where you live.
Also it doesn't mean it *should* be recycled. How much diesel gets burned to drive a truck around picking up the plastic? How much energy and water gets used to clean and prepare the plastic for recycling?
There are situations when it's "greener" to just put it in landfill, or burn it for heat. (Assuming the landfill isn't leaching into groundwater, the incinerator has properly scrubbed flue gas etc)
Then, we need to minimise the production of this kind of plastic. That will take regulations on the companies
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>"Also it doesn't mean it *should* be recycled" [good points about not recycling]
Very much agreed. There are lots of negative externalities involved.
>"Then, we need to minimise the production of this kind of plastic."
That won't amount to much, realistically. We need plastic. It is a miracle substance in so many ways. As you pointed out with recycling, replacing plastic with other materials could greatly increase other energy requirements, increase product weight and volume, lower shelf-life of som
Penn and Teller Told Us 20 Years Ago... (Score:3)
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P&T need 2 make mo BS eps.
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It did not debunk anything.
It is just propaganda.
Nearly all steel, aluminium and glass world wide is recycled.
Because it is much easier to make a good steel from a car wreck than digging out ore in Siberia or north Norway, ship it with a diesel train to a harbour and ship the ore to China, to get it smelted into iron or simple steel, and then ship it to Japan or Germany and make a good car steel from it. The energy cost of recycling stuff like aluminium is not even 10% of making it from fresh Bauxite - not
Recycling doesn't work because (Score:1)
the incentives are wrong. If the law mandated a slowly increasing percentage of recycled material, industry would find a way. Eventually making difficult to recycle plastic would become less and less profitable. There is just no hard incentive to fix things now.
What environmentalists really want (Score:2)
"Environmental groups have called plastic recycling a 'false solution.'" Yeah, they say this because they actually hate hydrocarbons. They're trying to bullshit people into believing the former when they really are trying to destroy humanity's use of the latter. Of course, they never practice what they preach but that's another matter.
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"Environmental groups have called plastic recycling a 'false solution.'" Yeah, they say this because they actually hate hydrocarbons. They're trying to bullshit people into believing the former when they really are trying to destroy humanity's use of the latter. Of course, they never practice what they preach but that's another matter.
Um, what?
We've discovered a simple way to decrease polltion (Score:2)
how is that a problem? (Score:2)
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Stop making babies. Each and every one represents a mountain of garbage.
So you want to use natural selection to breed people who will not listen when you try to convince them to work for your ends instead of their own? Let me know when that works out, because it never has before.
'When In Doubt Throw It Out' (Score:2)
Huh (Score:2)
The result is a lack of markets for most recycled plastics, with only 9 percent of all plastics ever produced having been recycled.
I'm impressed that it is that much.
Fraud should be prosecuted, it's not rocketscience (Score:1)
The chasing arrows logo, which promises rebirth for discarded materials, is frequently plastered on items that are not recyclable, particularly plastic products.
Why is it not prosecuted then?
In Europe that would be a majour scandal.
Hey, A Pattern (Score:2)
embraced recycling as a way to shift responsibility for waste onto individuals
Hey what a coincidence, they did the same thing with identity theft.
Well, sir, it looks like your identity has been stolen. You should purchase credit monitoring, file a police report, and write to every credit bureau, and dispute every bogus charge. Oh and be more careful with your identity so it does not, you know, get stolen again. Our company values are anti-theft.
So, anyway, Mr. Nobody, sorry you were stolen from and good
19th century solution (Score:2)
Recycled plastics are sorted by hand.
The way this should work is that they should go into a fractional distillation column, like petroleum does, possibly after dissolution in a solvent.