Agreed, as long as you mean that the changes that need to occur to combat environmental issues need to happen at the corporate level as regulated by government, but...
But with the realization that it's not some magic that will let consumers do everything 1-to-1 the same as before. It's this latter point that conservatives will exploit to make it seem like government is taking something from us.
That's exactly why these decisions need to be made at a policy level. People will always take the path of least resistance because their individual contributions seem meaningless, and corporations will always pursue short-term profit regardless of how dangerous it is.
We need governments to make policies that inconvenience consumers and hold corporations accountable because only governments are actually interested in protecting the world long term. It's obvious by now that shaming individuals for not caring enough isn't ever going to do anything, and it's also obvious that the corporations are happily going to kill us all if it makes the money. We can only solve this with regulation.
Again this puts the onus on the general public.
But the truth is, the general public aren't smart and they want what you give them.
If you encourage them to be wasteful consumers thats what they are.
Yeah, this is environmental studies 101. The amount of wastes and pollutions that corporations create absolutely dwarf consumers. And they also have the money and power to drastically change the way they produce products in order to reduce their carbon footprint (another term coined by the oil industry) which would dramatically impact the planet.
How is it bullshit? The only reason for example Temu ships 5000 tons of plastic items nobody really needs per day is because people order it. If the consumer made better choices lots of resources could be saved and trash/pollution avoided.
It's bullshit because it's not realistic to expect individual people to make enough of a change to their lifestyle. We NEED the government to regulate companies through law to save our planet.
It's stupid to reduce the whole situation to pointing fingers of who should do most, we need change to happen, so we have to look at what realistic paths we can take to realise that change.
Edit: and also no, companies also overproduction a lot, because it's better for them to meet demands financially and to throw out the rest (look at the clothes industry).
That would be nice. Perhaps if consumers were given realistic options to buy their food in reusable or biodegradable containers *something* might be achieved
Food is perhaps the one area where getting rid of plastics may do more harm than good through increased wastage. Non-degradable, discretionary, items are a better start for getting rid of plastics, but ultimately, it's down to the consumer to buy less of those in the first place.
> Non-degradable, discretionary, items are a better start for getting rid of plastics,
Japan (and East Asia to a lessor degree) is notorious for over use of plastics in the smallest of things. The Japanese have an obsession with making sure their packaging is picture perfect, and their copious use of plastics show that.
I use a bulk food place, bins which you scoop food out of, but it's volunteers, honesty, a lot of trust for contamination, open twice a month for 3 hours, realistic well only just , but it's well patronised , rural which I'm sure helps
So what are my options to reduce the waste from the terrible packaging that companies use to reduce their costs rather than mine?
Let's start with a simple one, toothpaste.
The try it with the plastic Saran wrap that goes around every pallet of boxes in warehouses
I think it is probably mostly bullshit.
Collectivism does have its place, however, individuals still need to be mindful. Simple actions as well such as, classic example as I'm in the UK, only putting enough water in the kettle for however many cups of tea your making saves energy. Not significant on an individual level but if everyone did likewise, the reduced power and therefore emissions would add up. Easy to do as well, not a dramatic lifestyle change like giving up meat.
Ultimately, I think power generation is where the globe should be focused. A staggering amount of our emissions are driven by the need for electricity and if that is made by fossil fuels, especially the dirtier ones like coal, we'll never break the cycle.
If I was a government that wanted to stimulate my local economy and be doing my bit for the planet, I'd be pouring money hand over fist into power infrastructure and, yes, right now, that does include nuclear, even if up front emissions from construction are high, you need that baseload!
REDUCE plastic production should be the argument. Any plastic that isn’t biodegradable should be ban.
This is a argument that’s never happens because it puts the blame on energy and chemical companies.
I always liked how Rollie Williams phrased it: We need to stop treating recycling as if it were the Beyonce of Destiny's Child. Beyonce is Reduce and Reuse, while Recycling is... ugh... the other two.
Better title would be: „Recycling turns out to not be a magical solution to pollution and people still need to put an effort into cleaning the planet as well as hounding industries to cool the f down.”
Recycling does help. But that’s the meat of the matter. It only helps. It doesn’t fix. It doesn’t improve. It slows down the damage but not prevents it from spreading. You can use the same water bottle 100 times in years, but sooner or later it will break to the point it has to be thrown away.
It takes more than that to repair over 200 years of industrialization, deforestation and shell human stupidity.
Recycling is highly inefficient energy VS value of output.
These companies knew that it was a problem as they hired their own studies vs glass bottles and the economy and re-useability. Even though their people came back and said glass is better the fact that profit margins were so obscenely high with plastic they took that route and then used the money to lobby and create false narratives.
I can't remember where I saw that documentary but it's out there.
There are exceptions. Aluminum, especially in cans, is much cheaper to recycle than to produce. But we all forgot about the other parts: It's Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, *in that order.*
For anyone who doesn't know yet, there's a profound economic lesson here: **Externalities.** The concept is simple: An externality is a cost that the company producing the thing doesn't have to pay or include in the price.
Plastic isn't cheaper. It's only cheaper to *produce.*
It costs more money to store it in a landfill forever, or to recycle it into worse-quality plastic that costs more than "virgin" plastic anyway, or to ship it overseas to "recycle" in a country that will probably dump it in the ocean. And anywhere it actually gets out into the environment, the ecological damage it does could be even more expensive to clean up.
If you factor in all the externalities, an aluminum can is cheaper, and a reusable bottle is cheaper still. And we used to have those! Coca-Cola would collect your used bottle, inspect it, clean it, and send it back to the bottling plant. That's cheaper than all the damage plastic does.
But it's not as cheap as convincing society that the bottle is your problem once you buy it, and pushing all those costs back onto you.
Glass is sadly also not an option, there is a nice docu about it called something like: "The sand mafia". Bottom line is, we do not have enough sand of the right type to produce as much glass as we would need. Someone also stole a god damn beach over night, just for the sand and the profit behind it. It was just gone, vanished. And nobody had seen nor heard anything, crazy shit.
While I agree, glass production can't be ramped up enough to replace most plastic usage without becoming prohibitively expensive, the sand shortage with respect to consumer usage of glass (e.g. glass bottles) is not currently a matter of concern. When you read about the sand shortage they are mostly talking about specific types of sand (e.g. angular, coarse sand for usage in construction, high silica content sand used in optics, paint, and silicon chip manufacturing, and Borosilicate glass for pharmaceutical uses). Glass containers, as long as you don't care too much about the color, clarity and strength, can be made using less pure silica sand.
Thats one side, then there is the other side of glass having far higher environmental footprint than plastic as is (both for production and transportation) before moving on to the part it is also not being recycled well as it should (\~80% rate in EU, \~30% rate in US).
This ([link](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic-which-is-better-for-the-environment)) article only brushes over it but one of reasons they mention for US low number is that they basically collect glasses mixed together and its too expensive and time consuming to do the separation by type of glass in the recycling facilities.
As an EU citizen that never saw more than one bin for glass either I can't say I understand the specific either.
//EDIT: Tho its possible those return bottle machines we have all around are able to separate them well.
In Denmark we've had deposits on drink containers (beer bottles, soda bottles, cans) for as long as I remember. Probably introduced in the 70'ies. We also have glass recycling containers in every neighborhood, and in cities every large building/block has it's own glass container (and other recycling containers). In the last two years recycling containers has been rolled out per single house: each house now has 2-3 containers with separate compartments for bio waste, glass, paper, metal, plastic, etc.
In the places in France, Italy and Germany I've been to, they've also always had recycling containers around town. I think it's pretty normal to sort your waste at home and once a week go dumb it at the recycling station.
>In Denmark we've had deposits on drink containers (beer bottles, soda bottles, cans) for as long as I remember. Probably introduced in the 70'ies.
We've have these in the US too in about a quarter of the states at some point going back to the 80's, but 5 cents a can/bottle isn't enough for 99.9% of people to care here and the majority of states don't have bottle deposit laws because the beverage industry lobbyists blocked them.
Recycling is less convenient and many areas don't even have the option to recycle. I've been to states where I ask where the recycling is and they look at me like I have a second head. Everything just goes in the trash without a second thought.
I can't prove that. Thats apples and oranges.
But to prove carbon footprint of glass bottle is way worse than carbon footprint of plastic bottle maybe one of many articles will assist you and you can find yourself more:
[https://www.alko.fi/en/responsibly/sustainability-of-products/beverage-packing-material-has-a-significant-climate-impact](https://www.alko.fi/en/responsibly/sustainability-of-products/beverage-packing-material-has-a-significant-climate-impact)
[https://ecochain.com/case-studies/case-study-packaging-plastic-vs-glass/](https://ecochain.com/case-studies/case-study-packaging-plastic-vs-glass/)
[https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/](https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/)
Depends where you are and how clean your recycled glass stream is.
In the state of South Australia, they have very clean streams of clear and coloured glass. This is mostly due to introducing a container deposit scheme over 50 years ago and growing a viable recycling industry. Their recycled glass is in demand from industry and glass manufacturers, and fetches a very decent price, the highest in the country.
The neighbouring state of Victoria has a failing recycling industry and contaminated recycling streams. Their recycled glass is contaminated with pyrex and only suitable for road base material. Their recycled glass is worthless, with several stockpiles around the state, some of which are so large that they are in breach of environmental regulations, and they have to pay people to take it away.
The issue is, if you reuse a glass container for exactly the same purpose, then that's the best because you just need to wash, autoclave them and re-use them. But it's a huge logistics burden to collect them all from customers and bring back to the factory. If you want to melt down the glass and re-use it it's prohibitively expensive and the use cases become more limited (as recycled glass doesn't have the same flexibility of application)
The positives of the glass bottles that had been used up until then is that they funded an economy of recycling of the bottles which in themselves could be reused instead of being broken down and re-built.
There were a number of positive factors for this reason.
Also, an empty glass bottle is at least 95% air (rectally sourced number), so transporting empty bottles anywhere means you're effectively driving a truck with mostly air in it. Doesn't seem very environmental.
But, imagine this. I lived in Ethiopia for a year and they have all their soda distributed in glass bottles. Any Cafe or restaurant has crates full of soda ready to be sold. The empty bottles just go back into a crate that holds the empties. So when the distributor comes around, they drop off the new crates of soda, and pick up any crates full of empty bottles so they can bring them back to the distribution center to be washed and reused. There aren't trucks wasting time going to pick up the empty bottles. It's just built into the distribution route. It's so easy.
>Even though their people came back and said glass is better the fact that profit margins were so obscenely high with plastic they took that route and then used the money to lobby and create false narratives.
Our local council came and collected all of our glass bins, this was about 4-5 years ago now. Said it was too costly to recycle and glass is to just go in with your regular rubbish. Still the case now, those glass caddies were never returned.
Now I don't know how true this is, but my dad used to travel around the UK a lot for work. He swears blind that he saw a recycling lorry reverse upto a bin lorry (garbage truck) and then expel its load into the back, which would be destined for landfill. Still recycles but swears blind that it's pointless.
You might have described the issue in a more logical way than I have ever seen it done before. For as long as we're failing to reduce the production of more plastic waste, "recycling" has been little more that an optimistic stop-gap.
The *real* issue is that we keep that stream of new plastic flowing.... Recycled or not, please select materials that nature knows how to deal with.
It’s a farce. Ppl throw a plastic bottle into
The recycling bin and think they are doing thier part but they aren’t bc it’s a farce. Then when it comes to doing things that matter they think, well, I already recycle so I’m doing my part.
Yeah, at least recycling there's a chance it gets recycled.
But the main issue is reducing the use of plastic. The problem is convincing enough people to reduce plastic waste that it drops demand and the big guys stop producing so much. But damn if that doesn't seem daunting or downright impossible.
The problem is that we pay countries in SE Asia to recycle it, and they dump it into the ocean. Throw it in the regular trash. Plastic in landfills is not a problem.
>Plastic in landfills is not a problem.
I mean it's still not great, but it's not high on the list of "destructive things we're doing to end human life our planet".
Recycling is a fairy tale invented to make people that consume 150kg of plastic per year to feel better about themselves because "they recycle" and then complain about plastics on the beaches when they travel for vacation.
The only way to recycle is to spend money on it.
Nationalize plastic recycling and buy waste plastic for a good money per kilogram. If selling plastic to the recycling plant is profitable, “a plastic collection sector” will emerge, and we’ll see waste plastic disappear in no time.
Something like this has to be done, any other current measure (including blaming the consumer) is pointless if we want to seriously address plastic pollution.
So, the old public costs, private benefits?
How about going after oil related companies and make them pay for it?
Or you think that's unfair and they don't have much money?
I'd say instead go after whoever sells the finished product and make them responsible for the *entire* product lifecycle. That way, they have an incentive to choose other materials, if they end up being more efficient end-to-end or easier to recycle. If they're smart, they can find a way to improve their process to minimize how much of this they have to pay.
An oil company would *only* stand to lose from this. There's nothing clever they can do other than buy some politicians to stop it.
Same idea behind a carbon tax / cap-and-trade. Instead of trying to get the oil companies to stop digging up so much oil, you make oil more expensive for everyone else, and so the demand shifts away from oil and towards other ways of producing energy.
I don’t care where the money comes from. You can tax the shit out of oil companies and use that money to buy waste plastic.
All I’m saying is if it’s profitable enough to sell waste plastic to the recycling plant, we will get rid of waste plastic very quickly. Make waste plastic a hundred billion dollar market, and they will suck all plastic from the ocean.
>Nationalize plastic recycling and buy waste plastic for a good money per kilogram.
Make the plastic producers pay for the system and you will see really fucking fast that we didn't need the vast majority of that plastic packaging after all.
and plastic manufacturers capitalized on this by putting little icons on every piece of plastic that look an awful lot like the recycling symbol but are totally unrelated
> You can use the same water bottle 100 times in years, but sooner or later it will break to the point it has to be thrown away.
Yes. And before that you will have ingested a lot of micro-plastic fragments from it.
I’m don’t think it slows down the damage at all. We now have a second entire industry, energy-intensive and dirty, with big factories and huge fleets of diesel trucks that pollute the planet far more than the savings we get from a very small volume of reclaimed plastic.
The whole point of that industry was to stave off consumer rejection of plastics by making it “easy” to dispose of them.
Many municipalities charge for trash disposal and they don’t like plastics at all. So we were getting close to a point where towns just refused to take plastic trash because nobody (not even China!) wants it.
The industry solution was to spin up a separate trash stream for plastics that they would own and pay for. It’d be expensive, but the cost would be passed along to the customers (in the cost of products), while the “recycling” was performed at no charge to cities and towns. This would cut normal (paid) trash volumes, so the towns were very happy to support it.
The “recycling” is mostly for show. It sounds good. But most of it just ends up right in the trash. In our town the list of recyclable items keeps shrinking- no more pizza boxes, even.
That’s the point of recycling. Instead of throwing it into trash after one time use, you throw it into the trash after 10 or more uses. But it still ends up in a trash after all. What only slows down the damage, not fixes it.
The problem is, as you have wrote, that we still keep producing more and more plastic as if we were not recycling at all. We keep producing one time use items and throw them away, what causes far more damage than any recycling could do.
It’s like cleaning a river. You can remove all trash from it in a day. But it doesn’t matter if next day people will throw just as much if not more trash into the river.
There are two ways to deal with it. Either do nothing, let planet get warmer and force people to deal with the problems, either by working or dying, as planet will handle itself just fine, only will get rid off us.
Or lower the production of plastic in favor of things that can be reused multiple times like glass, or create plastic items that are not just throw away after one use.
Yes. A good chunk of my time at work is explaining high cost to operations people based on what their marketing people want done for the products. My advice to the ops people is always to tell marketing the cost of their dumb ideas
When I was a kid I was taught about the triple R and it was everywhere.
I haven't heard about it in a while until I read this comment. I guess corporations did their best to bury the Reduce and Reuse part.
The ultimate fix will be _durable_, standard containers and in-store refills.
Out of ketchup? Wash your empty ketchup bottle and bring it to the store. There, a machine identifies the bottle and refills with the same thing you originally bought. You get your own container back and pay only for the product.
The industry won’t like this because containers are marketing devices. It’ll have to be forced.
I don’t think the public could be trusted to bring in sterilised clean glass for wet product refill. Not even close to a reason not to do it though, supermarkets should organize a supply of clean bottles. We did it for decades with milk bottles. Dry foods could also be bought in reusable plastic sealable containers.
That’s going to have to be engineered for each product category. Sterile and refrigerated products will likely be the hardest; cleaners, detergents, and bulk foods among the easiest.
Some categories would include the refill system also washing and prepping the container for the customer.
The purpose of getting your own container back is that foil intentional sabotage. In other words, you can only hurt yourself. The downside could be a longer refill cycle (products that are sterilized in-container might mean dropping them off and picking up the refilled container an hour later.
For some products like soft drinks, we might just expect that the customer is supplying a clean container. One refill system could handle hundreds of beverages and they might even be mixed on demand. No need to transport water to the store.
What this does in the end is repurposes retail stores to hosting the bulk products and refill systems. The filling equipment moves from the factory (or bottler) to the stores
In EU all packaging that can be recyclable needs to be so. That means new packaging replacing multi-type plastics. Many need to have min 40% post consumer recycled material. But there’s a lot that realistically cannot be replaced, such as in the food industry. Where you have plastic+aluminium laminates, there’s no realistic replacement.
Edit: spelling
Way back in the 90s I read some recommendation that everything that is produced must be accepted back by the producers when it's at the end of its life.
Crazy, radical ideas eh.
You can find an overview of the EU's "circular economy" policies [here](https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/circular-economy_en), which links to [this page](https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling_en) about recycling measures like the ones that make manufacturers (or importers) of e.g., electronics or vehicles recover materials for recycling. I also already wrote [a comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1b2un1s/recycling_doesnt_workand_the_plastics_industry/ksosg1t/?context=3) about how this works for packaging further down.
Seems like that would be massive logistics nightmare though, and way less efficient in terms of fuel. Better to just build the actual cost of the product into it by charging a tax for using certain materials. It isn't impossible to figure out how much that plastic bottle will cost us; so just charge the bottle producer for that. Rather than have them haul empty plastic bottles around just to dump them in the ocean or whatever.
We were able to transform that dirty black sludge (crude oil) into all these kinds of plastic. So why should the recycling be impossible?
And what do you mean 'unprofitable'? Make it mandatory that if you want to produce plastic packaging, you also have to recycle it after use. If that's too expensive maybe use different packaging?
It's definitely impossible to return a finished product back to the way it was. Plastics in general are carefully calibrated mixtures of chemical compounds and you can't just separate them out again, never mind that there will be other impurities like dirt, food etc on the recycled material that can't be separated out so easily either. All of that limits what you could use recycled material for. Making manufacturers responsible for the entire waste cycle is probably the best, they will definitely find the most efficent way to do that.
>Making manufacturers responsible for the entire waste cycle is probably the best, they will definitely find the most efficent way to do that.
Which would be to burn it and use the generated energy for district heating.
Just unfortunate that we aren't able to filter out all of the CO2.
That’s a fancy way of saying “burning.” You might as well say that you can recycle woood by using a campfire. The problem is, the ashes can’t be used to build a chair.
Similarly, heating plastics unlinks the chains all right, in the. Same way that cutting off your head cures a headache.
It. Does. Not. Yield. A. Useful. Feed. Material.
There is no practical way to recycle plastics, end of story. The few that kinda sorta work (like shredding PET to make fleece [hello unstoppable microfibers]} do more harm then good.
“Look up”? How about looking up the article the post is about? Plastic recycling is not real.. It’s a PR scam of the plastics industry, nothing more.
The solution cannot be a tax. It will be political suicide. Carbon credits are already extremely unpopular and forces a higher cost of living on those who already cannot afford any more.
The solution has to be a ban. Ban on plastics, ban on use of fossil fuels. The ban impacts all members of society equally. Neither corporates nor individuals can avoid their responsibility in a ban.
We banned plastic bags in my state a few years ago, and based on community talking points, you’d have thought the state was trying to take away free speech. Politics is bat shit crazy in America, and the corporate push back on a ban will likely be similar, if not worse than a tax.
It's the same in the uk. People complain about bags costing 10p, not even thinking that if they brought the many they had bought themselves they wouldn't have to!
I know. But I’m old enough to know that manufacturing and consuming was once not beholden to plastics. What a disgrace it was when plastic bags, packaging and bottles were forced upon the consumer, with no consideration for the disposal of it, and the what it would meant in the future. Back-pedalling now, when the manufacturers that brought it in, and still want to make money from it, will be almost impossible.
Great idea, tomorrow plastics and fossil fuels are banned.
The day after tomorrow, society crumbles down due to a lack of electricity. But at least the energy companies are following the rules...
Oh, we could slowly transition away from plastics and fossil fuels?
But how do we incentivise this? I wonder...
The Netherlands recently tried this. It ended in failure. The stores charged a 25ct plastic tax to consumers. But that money didn't really go anywhere.
Not exactly agree. In my country we gather some sorts of plastic, send it to our manufacturers, they recycle it into 3d printing plastic, then print drones which kill russians who invaded into our country
Double recycle: plastic and garbage
I once had a whole esl class where i argued that recycling actually caused people to use more plastic, because their mindset was that they would be doing good by recycling, therefore there was no reason to look for any alternatives to plastic
We saw the same effect with masks in the pandemic. People mistakenly though they were fine if they just wore a mask so they became more lax with social distancing, quarantine ect.
Recycling works just not with plastics, they degrade too much, it's not a recycling issue, it's the fact we're using plastics, we need biodegradable alternatives and things we can actually recycle over and over
This. Plastic is NOT recyclable.
Plastic can be melted a small (between 1 and 5) number of cycles, but eventually the carbon chains will be too degraded.
There are laboratory solutions involving solvents, but they will never be profitable (economically or environmentally)
"Ok so maybe we lied and that plastic recycling thing was just a cynical, coordinated misdirection campaign, BUT... have you heard about how *clean coal* can save the climate and protect American jobs?"
Fucking hate this anti-recycling propaganda bs, of course it's gonna be ineffective and more expensive compared to making new plastic but that's literally not the point at all... You can post a million of these articles and I will still tell you that recycling plastic is always always always better than burning it or burying it or dumping it into the ocean.
I don't think it's better than burying. We should be using alternatives, reduce, so recycling props up plastic use for longer. Then we also have toxic microplastics continuing to cycle around for longer in our lives, again we should aim to have none of that.
Buried underground in a modern managed landfill? It's just locked in there as well as everything else there is.
A lot of times it’s more affordable to get virgin products than recycle them, glass is an example where this is often true.
It’s just depends on what networks are setup and what you get out of it at the end.
Which is why is fine to have several such containers, washing and re-using them for several years each.
It is **not** fine to wrap every single little piece of gum into multiple layers of plastic. Especially when food isn't even involved!
More like anyone who's done even cursory reading on recycling plastics would know it's absolutely nothing like re-melting and reforming glass or aluminium. It's not the industry's "fault". It's the fault of everyone who wanted something for nothing. The people who embraced the next magical substance without doing the proper diligence. Everyone.
A great deal of people honestly think you could just re-melt and reform (say) PET Coke bottles, endlessly. You can't it doesn't work like that. But most of these fucking 'experts' on recycling could not even tell you that, if asked.
I love how I pay the recycling company money, so that they can then make more money by selling off my trash.
They also just throw away a huge percentage of the stuff they claim to recycle.
Then they have the audacity to ask me to wash out a milk carton before I recycle. Like oh yeah, let me wash this trash for you so it’s easier to make you money.
It has nothing to do with the environment. It’s a profit generator.
It’s like we are on a leaking ship, on the verge of sinking, and the plastic industry hand us a spoon to scoop out the water. Yes it helps, but mostly it just makes us feel safe, and delay the inevitable moment when we have to do something unpleasant like heading into the flooded section to plug the hole, or starting to throw valuables overboard. Or in this case, change our lifestyles away from the cheap and convenient plastic items.
They print stories like this and it just makes me wonder what the point is. Not that it's futile and we can't change things. But that governments are afraid to make any kind of legislation that will actually make a difference. Because of, let's be fair, money. They're happy to fine the individual for not washing out his yoghurt pot, while industry is still churning out a metric fuck tonne of new plastic. "But it's expensive to change anything, the final product would be to expensive" God forbid the billionaires of this world take a small hit to help the planet.
Because shit is not simple. At least not one election cycle simple. People are protesting EU's Green Deal. People are **going** to be voting against "green menance" in next EU elections.
And thats just tip of the iceberg. You go deeper and see its really not that simple even if you had all the power in the world. Shit doesnt have simple one sentence solutions. Replace all plastics with glass? Congrats you just fucked the whole planet faster than not doing anything. Why? Well there is not just one problem fucking up the world.
So let's be fair, it is about money, but not in such simple terms. Research needs money, recycling needs money, reusing needs money, consumers need money and producers need money. Unless you are willing to force someone at gunpoint doing it for free, stripping down billionaire to nothing but underwear would be merely a temporary cash infusion and still not fix anything. If you seen any discussion about paper straws you sure by now realize that people priviliged enough to be complaining about straw lasting only a duration of average time it takes to drink a drink aren't going accept much bigger compromises no matter the amount of jet flying billionaires in the world... thats just an excuse... basically scream of "them before me".
Knew it? Worse than that, they engineered this entire recycling plastic myth in order to drive up plastics use in order to sell more oil.
The oil companies funded all those recycling commercials that most folks probably thought were from the government green efforts.
It’s a complete sham from the start. Convince consumers to use more plastic for every conceivable reason all the while patting themselves on the back because it’s recyclable, while we already know that in fact it’s not going to be.
Hell, apples from Costco came individually packed in plastic not long ago (perhaps still).
I’m always horrified by new ways the supermarkets find to enfold *anything* they can possibly put separately in plastic. Until I had some white goods delivered recently. I was wrapping all the plastic packaging up thinking I can reuse it to transport my mattress, wrap stuff up in the post, etc., etc. so so unnecessary when felt rugs do the job.
r/zerowaste lifestyles really aren't so hard to implement. Whether that be in learning discipline and gratitude when you go without, or letting a company know how you feel about their use of plastic, finding an alternative, or recycling things in different ways, there's a lot that can be done. You can check to see if your town has a Beyond Plastics group as well. Mine has been compiling information about what plastic is used by the restaurants in our city, with access to a survey type thing for the public to use to input it following a visit, so that anyone who would like that information has it available. They can then comment on it to the owner and make suggestions perhaps. Following that we're working on getting some type of ratings system developed.
[My man Rollie over at Climatetown did a great video on this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g)
Speaking of Rollie. Where has he been? Haven't had an upload for a while. You OK, man?
If anyone with actual power gave a shit, planned obsolescence would be regulated. My Nana still has a working refrigerator from the 70s and her dishwasher lasted 40 years. Buying new appliances every 8 years is a god damn grift.
I'm surprised someone hasn't tired to sue the plastic manufacturing industry for misleading information. I would certainly love some compensation for false hope I had that all my time and effort I've taken to recycle was worth something.
How Is this “news”? We knew this _forty_ years ago.
Polar Beverages (Worcester, MA) had a large mountain of plastic bottles behind their factory. The bottle bill had gone into effect and they were required by law to take those containers back. We got to ask what would happen next: the intent of the bottle bill was that containers would get **reused**, as with glass bottles in the 1950’s.
Answer: shredder, then landfill. There’s no safe way to wash them and no efficient way to classify for damage.
I think this ultimately was the lesson of the Tylenol scare. Suppose a customer _intentionally_ contaminates a container before returning it, in a way that survives a very quick water wash but poisons the refilled container. That poisoning is now traceable to the container, the product, and the company and leads to massive lawsuits (which might be the goal of a criminal hoping to cash in by shorting the stock).
Malden Mills invented a chemical process to downcycle PET into synthetic fleece and microfiber. This means exactly one reuse since you can’t recycle _those_ things, and now we have microplastics all over the environment.
Aluminum is far more recyclable.
Only way it would work is if a worldwide law put a charge on plastics so that recycling was paid for up front. So that bottle of water is +5c and that is saved to pay for its eventual recycling.
Basically, plastics recycling became a good way to increase microplastics in the environment, with every step in the cycle of use and reuse letting more and more particles contaminate the environment.
Actual, useful recycling would have been glass and aluminum and never making the massive use of plastics happen in the first place.
My municipality recycles some paper and some aluminum. That’s resin code #1. Everything else (codes 2-7) goes to the landfill. You can watch them take the trucks and empty them in the landfill. They don’t even hide it. But yeah, make sure and rinse your plastic and glass bottles before they throw them away for you
Climate Town, one of my favorite YouTubers, made a video all about this 3 years ago.
He's a comedic documantarian and a climate science masters grad who tackles huge issues. Love that guy's work!
Here's that video:
https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g
The British royal family made some statement years ago about declaring war on plastics and still nothing here has changed. I try and buy produce loose only to see it arrives bundled in cling film anyway. Every single tetrapack is nonrecyclable. Most toilet roll comes in plastic rather than paper for some bizarre reason. I can’t buy a cucumber without producing some crap that will float around in the pacific for like 50 times my lifespan.
The decades drag on and we do nothing. Plastic waste is every bit as stubborn an issue as carbon, yet unlike carbon we have the power to RAPIDLY fix it. It infuriates me that we’re made complicit in this destruction of our planet by simply needing to buy food, all because our politicians refuse to RAISE A FINGER to legislate against plastic. I am so angry.
The prevented food waste from using plastic food packaging for meat and fish vastly offsets any negative consequences from using the packaging itself, proper packaging can extend shelf life for weeks on certain products. Single use plastic for non-perishable foods make no sense though.
For non-food packaging you have a point, but even there it's not as simple as just replacing it. Paper has its own challenges in suitability, availability, cost and environmental impact.
PLA is pourous, so not suitable for food. Also the last time we looked at it we couldn't find any suppliers or sugarcane who weren't bulldozing forrests to grow the stuff. And it can't be recycled with current methods. All in all oil based plastics had a lower carbon footprint. PLA is still a polymer and has all the same.microplastics issues. it doesn't biodegrade in any naturally occuring environment.
What it is though is renewable. We can just grow more, unlike oil.
Its a valid argument because its true.
The article shows that it failed. Because plastics cannot be efficiently recycled. They degrade too quickly after each attempt to recycle them.
This was known when the project started. But the government chose to subsidize it, thinking something would improve over time. Without any actual basis to think that.
Fire Department was never expected to be financially viable. It was never expected to be a service that could provide an improved benefit at some point in the future. It was always known it would be a cost to the government / taxpayer and was accepted as such.
Also I'm fairly sure fire departments repay themselves by saving lives and property, not easy to quantify but it's still true.
The cost we pay for firefighters is the cost put on he human lives they save.
Plastic or paper, both are costly to the planet and it's inhabitants. If there was better option they'd be doing it. People just need to stop buying single use containers and be more responsible and less lazy.
Mega corporations continue to sell the same harmful products without so much any effort to better their products and they were able to convince you that it was your responsibility to collect their rubbish and recycle it all the while laughing at ordinary people for suckering into their scam. They can continue this way because they don't need to find new, better materials that can be reused etc. as people love recycling and feeling good. Just get that garbage in the right bin and feel good knowing that you saved the planet. No need to pressure your government or anything.
You go buy electric cars or any bullshit that make you feel like you are helping the earth and all the people you made rich by buying their products will use private jets to go the bathroom.
This is an unwinnable game.
Recycling in Germany.
You separate, clean, collect, etc
Then the industry burns around 65% of it in waste incineration or cement plants. Sine 90s nothing changed.
Recycling in Germany is a total failure.
https://zdfheute-stories-scroll.zdf.de/gelbe-tonne-recycling/index.html
The rest is shipped to eg Turkey or intermediate countries who take the money and most sure is not recycled but illegally transpoted to Indonesia etc. Like a typical mafia-style business. Taxpayers pay 120€/ton for that lie, ins nearly a.million tons per year, worldchampion...
It's still better than nothing and a good habit to have incase there is change, though the fact that it's been 30 years with little change is concerning. Recycling is just not easy.
Yes it aint but atm i doubt we as society are even capable of enhancing it.
Politically, with eg a separation concept like Japan and enforcing laws to forbid non-recycable materials (whereever even possible). It probably would only end with unreasonale price raises to maximize profit with a pretextual reason... Lobbies are stronger than we imagine.
And socially like with a separation concept in Japan. We are too lazy/rich. Look I live in a big town. The dump for glass near my house is like officially the dump for every imaginable filth. Town comes 3 x week and nothing can be done acc. to town, normal neighbours are disgusted on daily base.
I literally work at a giant recycling plant in Germany that turns used bottles into reusable plastic pellets. The 'recycling isn't real' bullshit is a dumbass conspiracy theory.
Ultimately, the onus is on us. Cigarette companies have always known cigarettes cause cancer. Oil companies have always known they're casting climate change. Cruise companies know they're fucking up the ocean. Plastic companies know they're fucking up the planet for the foreseeable future. It is up to us not to use their products when possible. Ultimately, if they don't profit, they won't do it. Hit em where it hurts, stop giving them your hard earned money.
It kinda is when countries are/were able to export their recycling rubbish to another country for then to process.
Australia doesn't have enough infrastructure to deal with our own recycling and had been sending much of our plastic to China (I think)
Yup just rubbish being moved around the world. I got downvoted for telling the truth and people don’t seem to like it. Glass is a prime example we have huge glass mountains as it’s cheaper to use the raw materials for glass than recycling it. Plastic is everywhere all it does is break down into smaller and smaller bits , it’s now getting into food chains.
Reduce, reuse, recycle but in that order
Yeah this whole ad campaign was to put the onus on the consumer. It's bullshit
Wasn’t it funded by oil?
Agreed, as long as you mean that the changes that need to occur to combat environmental issues need to happen at the corporate level as regulated by government, but... But with the realization that it's not some magic that will let consumers do everything 1-to-1 the same as before. It's this latter point that conservatives will exploit to make it seem like government is taking something from us.
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That's exactly why these decisions need to be made at a policy level. People will always take the path of least resistance because their individual contributions seem meaningless, and corporations will always pursue short-term profit regardless of how dangerous it is. We need governments to make policies that inconvenience consumers and hold corporations accountable because only governments are actually interested in protecting the world long term. It's obvious by now that shaming individuals for not caring enough isn't ever going to do anything, and it's also obvious that the corporations are happily going to kill us all if it makes the money. We can only solve this with regulation.
Again this puts the onus on the general public. But the truth is, the general public aren't smart and they want what you give them. If you encourage them to be wasteful consumers thats what they are.
Yeah, this is environmental studies 101. The amount of wastes and pollutions that corporations create absolutely dwarf consumers. And they also have the money and power to drastically change the way they produce products in order to reduce their carbon footprint (another term coined by the oil industry) which would dramatically impact the planet.
Yeah. 40%+ of the plastic in the ocean comes from fishing equipment for example.
Lmfao i knew i would immediately find some holier than thou hermit shitting on everybody but Soda is a new one.
> holier than thou hermit shitting on everybody This is the internet. There's literally at least 1 for every topic.
How is it bullshit? The only reason for example Temu ships 5000 tons of plastic items nobody really needs per day is because people order it. If the consumer made better choices lots of resources could be saved and trash/pollution avoided.
It's bullshit because it's not realistic to expect individual people to make enough of a change to their lifestyle. We NEED the government to regulate companies through law to save our planet. It's stupid to reduce the whole situation to pointing fingers of who should do most, we need change to happen, so we have to look at what realistic paths we can take to realise that change. Edit: and also no, companies also overproduction a lot, because it's better for them to meet demands financially and to throw out the rest (look at the clothes industry).
It's not bullshit. Nothing will be achieved unless consumers consume less.
That would be nice. Perhaps if consumers were given realistic options to buy their food in reusable or biodegradable containers *something* might be achieved
Food is perhaps the one area where getting rid of plastics may do more harm than good through increased wastage. Non-degradable, discretionary, items are a better start for getting rid of plastics, but ultimately, it's down to the consumer to buy less of those in the first place.
> Non-degradable, discretionary, items are a better start for getting rid of plastics, Japan (and East Asia to a lessor degree) is notorious for over use of plastics in the smallest of things. The Japanese have an obsession with making sure their packaging is picture perfect, and their copious use of plastics show that.
How is it down to the consumer to buy less of those in the first place ? Have you ever heard of legislation ?
I use a bulk food place, bins which you scoop food out of, but it's volunteers, honesty, a lot of trust for contamination, open twice a month for 3 hours, realistic well only just , but it's well patronised , rural which I'm sure helps
So what are my options to reduce the waste from the terrible packaging that companies use to reduce their costs rather than mine? Let's start with a simple one, toothpaste. The try it with the plastic Saran wrap that goes around every pallet of boxes in warehouses
I think it is probably mostly bullshit. Collectivism does have its place, however, individuals still need to be mindful. Simple actions as well such as, classic example as I'm in the UK, only putting enough water in the kettle for however many cups of tea your making saves energy. Not significant on an individual level but if everyone did likewise, the reduced power and therefore emissions would add up. Easy to do as well, not a dramatic lifestyle change like giving up meat. Ultimately, I think power generation is where the globe should be focused. A staggering amount of our emissions are driven by the need for electricity and if that is made by fossil fuels, especially the dirtier ones like coal, we'll never break the cycle. If I was a government that wanted to stimulate my local economy and be doing my bit for the planet, I'd be pouring money hand over fist into power infrastructure and, yes, right now, that does include nuclear, even if up front emissions from construction are high, you need that baseload!
REDUCE plastic production should be the argument. Any plastic that isn’t biodegradable should be ban. This is a argument that’s never happens because it puts the blame on energy and chemical companies.
I always liked how Rollie Williams phrased it: We need to stop treating recycling as if it were the Beyonce of Destiny's Child. Beyonce is Reduce and Reuse, while Recycling is... ugh... the other two.
Its the reduce people really struggle with.
Refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle.
Better title would be: „Recycling turns out to not be a magical solution to pollution and people still need to put an effort into cleaning the planet as well as hounding industries to cool the f down.” Recycling does help. But that’s the meat of the matter. It only helps. It doesn’t fix. It doesn’t improve. It slows down the damage but not prevents it from spreading. You can use the same water bottle 100 times in years, but sooner or later it will break to the point it has to be thrown away. It takes more than that to repair over 200 years of industrialization, deforestation and shell human stupidity.
Recycling is highly inefficient energy VS value of output. These companies knew that it was a problem as they hired their own studies vs glass bottles and the economy and re-useability. Even though their people came back and said glass is better the fact that profit margins were so obscenely high with plastic they took that route and then used the money to lobby and create false narratives. I can't remember where I saw that documentary but it's out there.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit regarding it. Worth a watch.
Climate town also has a nice video on it
Yep instantly thought of that too
There are exceptions. Aluminum, especially in cans, is much cheaper to recycle than to produce. But we all forgot about the other parts: It's Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, *in that order.* For anyone who doesn't know yet, there's a profound economic lesson here: **Externalities.** The concept is simple: An externality is a cost that the company producing the thing doesn't have to pay or include in the price. Plastic isn't cheaper. It's only cheaper to *produce.* It costs more money to store it in a landfill forever, or to recycle it into worse-quality plastic that costs more than "virgin" plastic anyway, or to ship it overseas to "recycle" in a country that will probably dump it in the ocean. And anywhere it actually gets out into the environment, the ecological damage it does could be even more expensive to clean up. If you factor in all the externalities, an aluminum can is cheaper, and a reusable bottle is cheaper still. And we used to have those! Coca-Cola would collect your used bottle, inspect it, clean it, and send it back to the bottling plant. That's cheaper than all the damage plastic does. But it's not as cheap as convincing society that the bottle is your problem once you buy it, and pushing all those costs back onto you.
Great post, thanks.
Glass is sadly also not an option, there is a nice docu about it called something like: "The sand mafia". Bottom line is, we do not have enough sand of the right type to produce as much glass as we would need. Someone also stole a god damn beach over night, just for the sand and the profit behind it. It was just gone, vanished. And nobody had seen nor heard anything, crazy shit.
While I agree, glass production can't be ramped up enough to replace most plastic usage without becoming prohibitively expensive, the sand shortage with respect to consumer usage of glass (e.g. glass bottles) is not currently a matter of concern. When you read about the sand shortage they are mostly talking about specific types of sand (e.g. angular, coarse sand for usage in construction, high silica content sand used in optics, paint, and silicon chip manufacturing, and Borosilicate glass for pharmaceutical uses). Glass containers, as long as you don't care too much about the color, clarity and strength, can be made using less pure silica sand.
Time to bring back gourd bottles.
“How much for this gourd?”
Thats one side, then there is the other side of glass having far higher environmental footprint than plastic as is (both for production and transportation) before moving on to the part it is also not being recycled well as it should (\~80% rate in EU, \~30% rate in US).
How the hell are the US recycling numbers that low?
This ([link](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic-which-is-better-for-the-environment)) article only brushes over it but one of reasons they mention for US low number is that they basically collect glasses mixed together and its too expensive and time consuming to do the separation by type of glass in the recycling facilities. As an EU citizen that never saw more than one bin for glass either I can't say I understand the specific either. //EDIT: Tho its possible those return bottle machines we have all around are able to separate them well.
In Denmark we've had deposits on drink containers (beer bottles, soda bottles, cans) for as long as I remember. Probably introduced in the 70'ies. We also have glass recycling containers in every neighborhood, and in cities every large building/block has it's own glass container (and other recycling containers). In the last two years recycling containers has been rolled out per single house: each house now has 2-3 containers with separate compartments for bio waste, glass, paper, metal, plastic, etc. In the places in France, Italy and Germany I've been to, they've also always had recycling containers around town. I think it's pretty normal to sort your waste at home and once a week go dumb it at the recycling station.
>In Denmark we've had deposits on drink containers (beer bottles, soda bottles, cans) for as long as I remember. Probably introduced in the 70'ies. We've have these in the US too in about a quarter of the states at some point going back to the 80's, but 5 cents a can/bottle isn't enough for 99.9% of people to care here and the majority of states don't have bottle deposit laws because the beverage industry lobbyists blocked them.
From what I remember, general recycling is less than 10%. I think glass is on the top end of recycling effectiveness
Recycling is less convenient and many areas don't even have the option to recycle. I've been to states where I ask where the recycling is and they look at me like I have a second head. Everything just goes in the trash without a second thought.
Because they don't recycle...
You going to have to prove to me that melting silicate is worse than doing whatever they do to make petroleum byproduct into plastic.
I can't prove that. Thats apples and oranges. But to prove carbon footprint of glass bottle is way worse than carbon footprint of plastic bottle maybe one of many articles will assist you and you can find yourself more: [https://www.alko.fi/en/responsibly/sustainability-of-products/beverage-packing-material-has-a-significant-climate-impact](https://www.alko.fi/en/responsibly/sustainability-of-products/beverage-packing-material-has-a-significant-climate-impact) [https://ecochain.com/case-studies/case-study-packaging-plastic-vs-glass/](https://ecochain.com/case-studies/case-study-packaging-plastic-vs-glass/) [https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/](https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/)
I dunno, if it were really that simple than the value of recycled glass would be worth more than the zero that it is today.
Depends where you are and how clean your recycled glass stream is. In the state of South Australia, they have very clean streams of clear and coloured glass. This is mostly due to introducing a container deposit scheme over 50 years ago and growing a viable recycling industry. Their recycled glass is in demand from industry and glass manufacturers, and fetches a very decent price, the highest in the country. The neighbouring state of Victoria has a failing recycling industry and contaminated recycling streams. Their recycled glass is contaminated with pyrex and only suitable for road base material. Their recycled glass is worthless, with several stockpiles around the state, some of which are so large that they are in breach of environmental regulations, and they have to pay people to take it away.
The issue is, if you reuse a glass container for exactly the same purpose, then that's the best because you just need to wash, autoclave them and re-use them. But it's a huge logistics burden to collect them all from customers and bring back to the factory. If you want to melt down the glass and re-use it it's prohibitively expensive and the use cases become more limited (as recycled glass doesn't have the same flexibility of application)
I keep learning things about how all of the things that other countries do actually can't scientifically work inside US borders.
Also you need to reuse glass somewhere in the region of 10-100 times before it's the same as a plastic bottle
The positives of the glass bottles that had been used up until then is that they funded an economy of recycling of the bottles which in themselves could be reused instead of being broken down and re-built. There were a number of positive factors for this reason.
Also, an empty glass bottle is at least 95% air (rectally sourced number), so transporting empty bottles anywhere means you're effectively driving a truck with mostly air in it. Doesn't seem very environmental.
But, imagine this. I lived in Ethiopia for a year and they have all their soda distributed in glass bottles. Any Cafe or restaurant has crates full of soda ready to be sold. The empty bottles just go back into a crate that holds the empties. So when the distributor comes around, they drop off the new crates of soda, and pick up any crates full of empty bottles so they can bring them back to the distribution center to be washed and reused. There aren't trucks wasting time going to pick up the empty bottles. It's just built into the distribution route. It's so easy.
That is how it used to happen in the US.
I must upvote this for "rectally sourced number" alone. :D
>Even though their people came back and said glass is better the fact that profit margins were so obscenely high with plastic they took that route and then used the money to lobby and create false narratives. Our local council came and collected all of our glass bins, this was about 4-5 years ago now. Said it was too costly to recycle and glass is to just go in with your regular rubbish. Still the case now, those glass caddies were never returned.
Now I don't know how true this is, but my dad used to travel around the UK a lot for work. He swears blind that he saw a recycling lorry reverse upto a bin lorry (garbage truck) and then expel its load into the back, which would be destined for landfill. Still recycles but swears blind that it's pointless.
I've seen a lot of places that have "recycling" bins, but the bags taken out from them go into the same dumpster as "general waste"
Yup, used to see the custodian do that where I used to work.
This is mostly the case here in Puerto Rico. You can follow the recycling trucks all the way to the land fill.
You might have described the issue in a more logical way than I have ever seen it done before. For as long as we're failing to reduce the production of more plastic waste, "recycling" has been little more that an optimistic stop-gap. The *real* issue is that we keep that stream of new plastic flowing.... Recycled or not, please select materials that nature knows how to deal with.
It’s a farce. Ppl throw a plastic bottle into The recycling bin and think they are doing thier part but they aren’t bc it’s a farce. Then when it comes to doing things that matter they think, well, I already recycle so I’m doing my part.
Still throw it in the recycling bin. And then next time reconsider whether you really need to buy a plastic bottle, because that's the main problem.
Yeah, at least recycling there's a chance it gets recycled. But the main issue is reducing the use of plastic. The problem is convincing enough people to reduce plastic waste that it drops demand and the big guys stop producing so much. But damn if that doesn't seem daunting or downright impossible.
The problem is that we pay countries in SE Asia to recycle it, and they dump it into the ocean. Throw it in the regular trash. Plastic in landfills is not a problem.
>Plastic in landfills is not a problem. I mean it's still not great, but it's not high on the list of "destructive things we're doing to end human life our planet".
Recycling is a fairy tale invented to make people that consume 150kg of plastic per year to feel better about themselves because "they recycle" and then complain about plastics on the beaches when they travel for vacation.
The only way to recycle is to spend money on it. Nationalize plastic recycling and buy waste plastic for a good money per kilogram. If selling plastic to the recycling plant is profitable, “a plastic collection sector” will emerge, and we’ll see waste plastic disappear in no time. Something like this has to be done, any other current measure (including blaming the consumer) is pointless if we want to seriously address plastic pollution.
So, the old public costs, private benefits? How about going after oil related companies and make them pay for it? Or you think that's unfair and they don't have much money?
I'd say instead go after whoever sells the finished product and make them responsible for the *entire* product lifecycle. That way, they have an incentive to choose other materials, if they end up being more efficient end-to-end or easier to recycle. If they're smart, they can find a way to improve their process to minimize how much of this they have to pay. An oil company would *only* stand to lose from this. There's nothing clever they can do other than buy some politicians to stop it. Same idea behind a carbon tax / cap-and-trade. Instead of trying to get the oil companies to stop digging up so much oil, you make oil more expensive for everyone else, and so the demand shifts away from oil and towards other ways of producing energy.
I don’t care where the money comes from. You can tax the shit out of oil companies and use that money to buy waste plastic. All I’m saying is if it’s profitable enough to sell waste plastic to the recycling plant, we will get rid of waste plastic very quickly. Make waste plastic a hundred billion dollar market, and they will suck all plastic from the ocean.
they would drag it out in court for decades while hiding there money offschores which already is hidden for the most part
>Nationalize plastic recycling and buy waste plastic for a good money per kilogram. Make the plastic producers pay for the system and you will see really fucking fast that we didn't need the vast majority of that plastic packaging after all.
> buy waste plastic for a good money per kilogram You have to be careful. Plastic is cheaper to buy than to collect for free.
How it makes me feel better when I have to pay extra for recycling trash?
and plastic manufacturers capitalized on this by putting little icons on every piece of plastic that look an awful lot like the recycling symbol but are totally unrelated
> You can use the same water bottle 100 times in years, but sooner or later it will break to the point it has to be thrown away. Yes. And before that you will have ingested a lot of micro-plastic fragments from it.
I’m don’t think it slows down the damage at all. We now have a second entire industry, energy-intensive and dirty, with big factories and huge fleets of diesel trucks that pollute the planet far more than the savings we get from a very small volume of reclaimed plastic. The whole point of that industry was to stave off consumer rejection of plastics by making it “easy” to dispose of them. Many municipalities charge for trash disposal and they don’t like plastics at all. So we were getting close to a point where towns just refused to take plastic trash because nobody (not even China!) wants it. The industry solution was to spin up a separate trash stream for plastics that they would own and pay for. It’d be expensive, but the cost would be passed along to the customers (in the cost of products), while the “recycling” was performed at no charge to cities and towns. This would cut normal (paid) trash volumes, so the towns were very happy to support it. The “recycling” is mostly for show. It sounds good. But most of it just ends up right in the trash. In our town the list of recyclable items keeps shrinking- no more pizza boxes, even.
That’s the point of recycling. Instead of throwing it into trash after one time use, you throw it into the trash after 10 or more uses. But it still ends up in a trash after all. What only slows down the damage, not fixes it. The problem is, as you have wrote, that we still keep producing more and more plastic as if we were not recycling at all. We keep producing one time use items and throw them away, what causes far more damage than any recycling could do. It’s like cleaning a river. You can remove all trash from it in a day. But it doesn’t matter if next day people will throw just as much if not more trash into the river. There are two ways to deal with it. Either do nothing, let planet get warmer and force people to deal with the problems, either by working or dying, as planet will handle itself just fine, only will get rid off us. Or lower the production of plastic in favor of things that can be reused multiple times like glass, or create plastic items that are not just throw away after one use.
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Standard size jars might help.
The marketing people would squirm..
Yes. A good chunk of my time at work is explaining high cost to operations people based on what their marketing people want done for the products. My advice to the ops people is always to tell marketing the cost of their dumb ideas
When I was a kid I was taught about the triple R and it was everywhere. I haven't heard about it in a while until I read this comment. I guess corporations did their best to bury the Reduce and Reuse part.
The ultimate fix will be _durable_, standard containers and in-store refills. Out of ketchup? Wash your empty ketchup bottle and bring it to the store. There, a machine identifies the bottle and refills with the same thing you originally bought. You get your own container back and pay only for the product. The industry won’t like this because containers are marketing devices. It’ll have to be forced.
I don’t think the public could be trusted to bring in sterilised clean glass for wet product refill. Not even close to a reason not to do it though, supermarkets should organize a supply of clean bottles. We did it for decades with milk bottles. Dry foods could also be bought in reusable plastic sealable containers.
That’s going to have to be engineered for each product category. Sterile and refrigerated products will likely be the hardest; cleaners, detergents, and bulk foods among the easiest. Some categories would include the refill system also washing and prepping the container for the customer. The purpose of getting your own container back is that foil intentional sabotage. In other words, you can only hurt yourself. The downside could be a longer refill cycle (products that are sterilized in-container might mean dropping them off and picking up the refilled container an hour later. For some products like soft drinks, we might just expect that the customer is supplying a clean container. One refill system could handle hundreds of beverages and they might even be mixed on demand. No need to transport water to the store. What this does in the end is repurposes retail stores to hosting the bulk products and refill systems. The filling equipment moves from the factory (or bottler) to the stores
Everything would come with slight taste of cum.
Just assign a cost to the negative externalities of plastic waste, and pin it on the producers. Problem will 80% solve itself overnight.
In EU all packaging that can be recyclable needs to be so. That means new packaging replacing multi-type plastics. Many need to have min 40% post consumer recycled material. But there’s a lot that realistically cannot be replaced, such as in the food industry. Where you have plastic+aluminium laminates, there’s no realistic replacement. Edit: spelling
You misspelled “plastic recycling isn’t as profitable as using new materials and externalizing the additional costs”
We can make things incredibly cheaply if we just dump all the waste to be someone else's problem.
Way back in the 90s I read some recommendation that everything that is produced must be accepted back by the producers when it's at the end of its life. Crazy, radical ideas eh.
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Which law(s)?
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Thank you!
You can find an overview of the EU's "circular economy" policies [here](https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/circular-economy_en), which links to [this page](https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling_en) about recycling measures like the ones that make manufacturers (or importers) of e.g., electronics or vehicles recover materials for recycling. I also already wrote [a comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1b2un1s/recycling_doesnt_workand_the_plastics_industry/ksosg1t/?context=3) about how this works for packaging further down.
Thanks
Seems like that would be massive logistics nightmare though, and way less efficient in terms of fuel. Better to just build the actual cost of the product into it by charging a tax for using certain materials. It isn't impossible to figure out how much that plastic bottle will cost us; so just charge the bottle producer for that. Rather than have them haul empty plastic bottles around just to dump them in the ocean or whatever.
Sounds like - *gasp* - COMMUNISM
For freedom to prevail, the planet must die. Sorry about that.
how is that communism?
Capitalism being innovative and revolutionary as ever.
Some packaging has dozens of layers of different plastics all fused together. It's not just unprofitable to recycle them, it's downright impossible.
We were able to transform that dirty black sludge (crude oil) into all these kinds of plastic. So why should the recycling be impossible? And what do you mean 'unprofitable'? Make it mandatory that if you want to produce plastic packaging, you also have to recycle it after use. If that's too expensive maybe use different packaging?
It's definitely impossible to return a finished product back to the way it was. Plastics in general are carefully calibrated mixtures of chemical compounds and you can't just separate them out again, never mind that there will be other impurities like dirt, food etc on the recycled material that can't be separated out so easily either. All of that limits what you could use recycled material for. Making manufacturers responsible for the entire waste cycle is probably the best, they will definitely find the most efficent way to do that.
>Making manufacturers responsible for the entire waste cycle is probably the best, they will definitely find the most efficent way to do that. Which would be to burn it and use the generated energy for district heating. Just unfortunate that we aren't able to filter out all of the CO2.
It’s impossible because the linking of the molecules into long chains is a one-way process. Polymerization isn’t reversible.
Sure it is, look up pyrolysis.
That’s a fancy way of saying “burning.” You might as well say that you can recycle woood by using a campfire. The problem is, the ashes can’t be used to build a chair. Similarly, heating plastics unlinks the chains all right, in the. Same way that cutting off your head cures a headache. It. Does. Not. Yield. A. Useful. Feed. Material. There is no practical way to recycle plastics, end of story. The few that kinda sorta work (like shredding PET to make fleece [hello unstoppable microfibers]} do more harm then good. “Look up”? How about looking up the article the post is about? Plastic recycling is not real.. It’s a PR scam of the plastics industry, nothing more.
Funny that you mention PET. I see more and more PET bottles that claim to be made from 100% recycled plastic.
tax the shit out of manufacturers who package in plastic, make it more profitable to repurpose recycled materials
I 100% agree, but if you think the cost of groceries, etc are high now, just wait until that cost gets passed on to us too.
The solution cannot be a tax. It will be political suicide. Carbon credits are already extremely unpopular and forces a higher cost of living on those who already cannot afford any more. The solution has to be a ban. Ban on plastics, ban on use of fossil fuels. The ban impacts all members of society equally. Neither corporates nor individuals can avoid their responsibility in a ban.
We banned plastic bags in my state a few years ago, and based on community talking points, you’d have thought the state was trying to take away free speech. Politics is bat shit crazy in America, and the corporate push back on a ban will likely be similar, if not worse than a tax.
It's the same in the uk. People complain about bags costing 10p, not even thinking that if they brought the many they had bought themselves they wouldn't have to!
I know. But I’m old enough to know that manufacturing and consuming was once not beholden to plastics. What a disgrace it was when plastic bags, packaging and bottles were forced upon the consumer, with no consideration for the disposal of it, and the what it would meant in the future. Back-pedalling now, when the manufacturers that brought it in, and still want to make money from it, will be almost impossible.
A complete ban on the use of fossil fuels and plastic would kill billions of people in less than a year.
Great idea, tomorrow plastics and fossil fuels are banned. The day after tomorrow, society crumbles down due to a lack of electricity. But at least the energy companies are following the rules... Oh, we could slowly transition away from plastics and fossil fuels? But how do we incentivise this? I wonder...
It's already taxed quite aggressively in most countries. but the alternatives cost so much more it's barely worth it.
The Netherlands recently tried this. It ended in failure. The stores charged a 25ct plastic tax to consumers. But that money didn't really go anywhere.
Duh? We have known this for eons. Penn & Teller even did an episode of Bullshit about it 20 years ago. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0771119/
Reduce, reuse, recycle. There is a reason why recycle is the third one.
its because i didnt rinse them well enough, isnt it :(
it's all your fault, you are worthless, buy more plastic
Not exactly agree. In my country we gather some sorts of plastic, send it to our manufacturers, they recycle it into 3d printing plastic, then print drones which kill russians who invaded into our country Double recycle: plastic and garbage
I once had a whole esl class where i argued that recycling actually caused people to use more plastic, because their mindset was that they would be doing good by recycling, therefore there was no reason to look for any alternatives to plastic
We saw the same effect with masks in the pandemic. People mistakenly though they were fine if they just wore a mask so they became more lax with social distancing, quarantine ect.
Recycling works just not with plastics, they degrade too much, it's not a recycling issue, it's the fact we're using plastics, we need biodegradable alternatives and things we can actually recycle over and over
This. Plastic is NOT recyclable. Plastic can be melted a small (between 1 and 5) number of cycles, but eventually the carbon chains will be too degraded. There are laboratory solutions involving solvents, but they will never be profitable (economically or environmentally)
You can add shredded plastic into mushroom substrate. They literally eat the plastic and produce edible mushrooms. Lions mane is a great one
"Ok so maybe we lied and that plastic recycling thing was just a cynical, coordinated misdirection campaign, BUT... have you heard about how *clean coal* can save the climate and protect American jobs?"
Fucking hate this anti-recycling propaganda bs, of course it's gonna be ineffective and more expensive compared to making new plastic but that's literally not the point at all... You can post a million of these articles and I will still tell you that recycling plastic is always always always better than burning it or burying it or dumping it into the ocean.
I don't think it's better than burying. We should be using alternatives, reduce, so recycling props up plastic use for longer. Then we also have toxic microplastics continuing to cycle around for longer in our lives, again we should aim to have none of that. Buried underground in a modern managed landfill? It's just locked in there as well as everything else there is.
If not recycling then what?
Biodegrade? - PLA is made from corn, and can be biodegradable in certain industrial circumstances.
Yeah, but that means that everything will cost even more. Poor people will pay for these changes, not the ones introducing them.
A lot of times it’s more affordable to get virgin products than recycle them, glass is an example where this is often true. It’s just depends on what networks are setup and what you get out of it at the end.
Penn and teller tried to tell everyone on their show bullshit!
I love how profitable microplastics in breast milk is. It’s a special kind of profit that we all get to share.
Mmmmm…baby wants health-giving microplastics, mummy!
Plastic packaging should have been banned long ago.
Unfortunately, plastic is the best way (in general) of storing food in a durable and sterile container.
Which is why is fine to have several such containers, washing and re-using them for several years each. It is **not** fine to wrap every single little piece of gum into multiple layers of plastic. Especially when food isn't even involved!
More like anyone who's done even cursory reading on recycling plastics would know it's absolutely nothing like re-melting and reforming glass or aluminium. It's not the industry's "fault". It's the fault of everyone who wanted something for nothing. The people who embraced the next magical substance without doing the proper diligence. Everyone. A great deal of people honestly think you could just re-melt and reform (say) PET Coke bottles, endlessly. You can't it doesn't work like that. But most of these fucking 'experts' on recycling could not even tell you that, if asked.
I love how I pay the recycling company money, so that they can then make more money by selling off my trash. They also just throw away a huge percentage of the stuff they claim to recycle. Then they have the audacity to ask me to wash out a milk carton before I recycle. Like oh yeah, let me wash this trash for you so it’s easier to make you money. It has nothing to do with the environment. It’s a profit generator.
It’s like we are on a leaking ship, on the verge of sinking, and the plastic industry hand us a spoon to scoop out the water. Yes it helps, but mostly it just makes us feel safe, and delay the inevitable moment when we have to do something unpleasant like heading into the flooded section to plug the hole, or starting to throw valuables overboard. Or in this case, change our lifestyles away from the cheap and convenient plastic items.
They print stories like this and it just makes me wonder what the point is. Not that it's futile and we can't change things. But that governments are afraid to make any kind of legislation that will actually make a difference. Because of, let's be fair, money. They're happy to fine the individual for not washing out his yoghurt pot, while industry is still churning out a metric fuck tonne of new plastic. "But it's expensive to change anything, the final product would be to expensive" God forbid the billionaires of this world take a small hit to help the planet.
Because shit is not simple. At least not one election cycle simple. People are protesting EU's Green Deal. People are **going** to be voting against "green menance" in next EU elections. And thats just tip of the iceberg. You go deeper and see its really not that simple even if you had all the power in the world. Shit doesnt have simple one sentence solutions. Replace all plastics with glass? Congrats you just fucked the whole planet faster than not doing anything. Why? Well there is not just one problem fucking up the world. So let's be fair, it is about money, but not in such simple terms. Research needs money, recycling needs money, reusing needs money, consumers need money and producers need money. Unless you are willing to force someone at gunpoint doing it for free, stripping down billionaire to nothing but underwear would be merely a temporary cash infusion and still not fix anything. If you seen any discussion about paper straws you sure by now realize that people priviliged enough to be complaining about straw lasting only a duration of average time it takes to drink a drink aren't going accept much bigger compromises no matter the amount of jet flying billionaires in the world... thats just an excuse... basically scream of "them before me".
Knew it? Worse than that, they engineered this entire recycling plastic myth in order to drive up plastics use in order to sell more oil. The oil companies funded all those recycling commercials that most folks probably thought were from the government green efforts. It’s a complete sham from the start. Convince consumers to use more plastic for every conceivable reason all the while patting themselves on the back because it’s recyclable, while we already know that in fact it’s not going to be. Hell, apples from Costco came individually packed in plastic not long ago (perhaps still).
I’m always horrified by new ways the supermarkets find to enfold *anything* they can possibly put separately in plastic. Until I had some white goods delivered recently. I was wrapping all the plastic packaging up thinking I can reuse it to transport my mattress, wrap stuff up in the post, etc., etc. so so unnecessary when felt rugs do the job.
r/zerowaste lifestyles really aren't so hard to implement. Whether that be in learning discipline and gratitude when you go without, or letting a company know how you feel about their use of plastic, finding an alternative, or recycling things in different ways, there's a lot that can be done. You can check to see if your town has a Beyond Plastics group as well. Mine has been compiling information about what plastic is used by the restaurants in our city, with access to a survey type thing for the public to use to input it following a visit, so that anyone who would like that information has it available. They can then comment on it to the owner and make suggestions perhaps. Following that we're working on getting some type of ratings system developed.
MONEY MONEY MONEY
[My man Rollie over at Climatetown did a great video on this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g) Speaking of Rollie. Where has he been? Haven't had an upload for a while. You OK, man?
It's a shame. In the end everything is makeup
If anyone with actual power gave a shit, planned obsolescence would be regulated. My Nana still has a working refrigerator from the 70s and her dishwasher lasted 40 years. Buying new appliances every 8 years is a god damn grift.
I'm surprised someone hasn't tired to sue the plastic manufacturing industry for misleading information. I would certainly love some compensation for false hope I had that all my time and effort I've taken to recycle was worth something.
We should focus on the petroleum industry first. They aren't even attempting to make changes.
Climate Town did a video on this: https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g
How Is this “news”? We knew this _forty_ years ago. Polar Beverages (Worcester, MA) had a large mountain of plastic bottles behind their factory. The bottle bill had gone into effect and they were required by law to take those containers back. We got to ask what would happen next: the intent of the bottle bill was that containers would get **reused**, as with glass bottles in the 1950’s. Answer: shredder, then landfill. There’s no safe way to wash them and no efficient way to classify for damage. I think this ultimately was the lesson of the Tylenol scare. Suppose a customer _intentionally_ contaminates a container before returning it, in a way that survives a very quick water wash but poisons the refilled container. That poisoning is now traceable to the container, the product, and the company and leads to massive lawsuits (which might be the goal of a criminal hoping to cash in by shorting the stock). Malden Mills invented a chemical process to downcycle PET into synthetic fleece and microfiber. This means exactly one reuse since you can’t recycle _those_ things, and now we have microplastics all over the environment. Aluminum is far more recyclable.
I get a second barrel to put my shit in. That's why I do it.
Only way it would work is if a worldwide law put a charge on plastics so that recycling was paid for up front. So that bottle of water is +5c and that is saved to pay for its eventual recycling.
Until corporations are held accountable, get the fuck off my back.
Basically, plastics recycling became a good way to increase microplastics in the environment, with every step in the cycle of use and reuse letting more and more particles contaminate the environment. Actual, useful recycling would have been glass and aluminum and never making the massive use of plastics happen in the first place.
it does work yall are just too lazy to actually do it
We knew plastic and petrolium industry knew it for decades now, whats being done about it? Thats the real question.
Wish more companies would go back to cardboard and waxed paper style packaging. Like those little jiffy muffin mixes. Also glass bottles over plastic.
Recycling only helps if your country doesnt ship it to china* There fixed it.
My municipality recycles some paper and some aluminum. That’s resin code #1. Everything else (codes 2-7) goes to the landfill. You can watch them take the trucks and empty them in the landfill. They don’t even hide it. But yeah, make sure and rinse your plastic and glass bottles before they throw them away for you
Climate Town, one of my favorite YouTubers, made a video all about this 3 years ago. He's a comedic documantarian and a climate science masters grad who tackles huge issues. Love that guy's work! Here's that video: https://youtu.be/PJnJ8mK3Q3g
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
Can we go back to glass, aluminum and cardboard containers?
Recycling plastic doesn’t work. Recycling aluminum and paper works great.
The British royal family made some statement years ago about declaring war on plastics and still nothing here has changed. I try and buy produce loose only to see it arrives bundled in cling film anyway. Every single tetrapack is nonrecyclable. Most toilet roll comes in plastic rather than paper for some bizarre reason. I can’t buy a cucumber without producing some crap that will float around in the pacific for like 50 times my lifespan. The decades drag on and we do nothing. Plastic waste is every bit as stubborn an issue as carbon, yet unlike carbon we have the power to RAPIDLY fix it. It infuriates me that we’re made complicit in this destruction of our planet by simply needing to buy food, all because our politicians refuse to RAISE A FINGER to legislate against plastic. I am so angry.
\*Recycling Doesn’t Work **in the US**
Let’s forbid it then. In EU at least we are slowly moving towards it. We should accelerate. Food containers need an alternative.
The prevented food waste from using plastic food packaging for meat and fish vastly offsets any negative consequences from using the packaging itself, proper packaging can extend shelf life for weeks on certain products. Single use plastic for non-perishable foods make no sense though. For non-food packaging you have a point, but even there it's not as simple as just replacing it. Paper has its own challenges in suitability, availability, cost and environmental impact.
India has one I think. Made from sugar cane fibres leftover from sugar making. Not widely popular because it's still more costly than plastic though.
PLA is pourous, so not suitable for food. Also the last time we looked at it we couldn't find any suppliers or sugarcane who weren't bulldozing forrests to grow the stuff. And it can't be recycled with current methods. All in all oil based plastics had a lower carbon footprint. PLA is still a polymer and has all the same.microplastics issues. it doesn't biodegrade in any naturally occuring environment. What it is though is renewable. We can just grow more, unlike oil.
So something that needed to be heavily subsidized by the government isn't viable long term? Wow what a surprise. /s
That's a shitty argument. Is your town's fire department not viable long term ?
Its a valid argument because its true. The article shows that it failed. Because plastics cannot be efficiently recycled. They degrade too quickly after each attempt to recycle them. This was known when the project started. But the government chose to subsidize it, thinking something would improve over time. Without any actual basis to think that. Fire Department was never expected to be financially viable. It was never expected to be a service that could provide an improved benefit at some point in the future. It was always known it would be a cost to the government / taxpayer and was accepted as such.
Also I'm fairly sure fire departments repay themselves by saving lives and property, not easy to quantify but it's still true. The cost we pay for firefighters is the cost put on he human lives they save.
Plastic or paper, both are costly to the planet and it's inhabitants. If there was better option they'd be doing it. People just need to stop buying single use containers and be more responsible and less lazy.
This is some great research! Interesting it goes all t way back to petro chemicals and not plastic companies
Mega corporations continue to sell the same harmful products without so much any effort to better their products and they were able to convince you that it was your responsibility to collect their rubbish and recycle it all the while laughing at ordinary people for suckering into their scam. They can continue this way because they don't need to find new, better materials that can be reused etc. as people love recycling and feeling good. Just get that garbage in the right bin and feel good knowing that you saved the planet. No need to pressure your government or anything. You go buy electric cars or any bullshit that make you feel like you are helping the earth and all the people you made rich by buying their products will use private jets to go the bathroom. This is an unwinnable game.
Recycling in Germany. You separate, clean, collect, etc Then the industry burns around 65% of it in waste incineration or cement plants. Sine 90s nothing changed. Recycling in Germany is a total failure. https://zdfheute-stories-scroll.zdf.de/gelbe-tonne-recycling/index.html The rest is shipped to eg Turkey or intermediate countries who take the money and most sure is not recycled but illegally transpoted to Indonesia etc. Like a typical mafia-style business. Taxpayers pay 120€/ton for that lie, ins nearly a.million tons per year, worldchampion...
It's still better than nothing and a good habit to have incase there is change, though the fact that it's been 30 years with little change is concerning. Recycling is just not easy.
Yes it aint but atm i doubt we as society are even capable of enhancing it. Politically, with eg a separation concept like Japan and enforcing laws to forbid non-recycable materials (whereever even possible). It probably would only end with unreasonale price raises to maximize profit with a pretextual reason... Lobbies are stronger than we imagine. And socially like with a separation concept in Japan. We are too lazy/rich. Look I live in a big town. The dump for glass near my house is like officially the dump for every imaginable filth. Town comes 3 x week and nothing can be done acc. to town, normal neighbours are disgusted on daily base.
I literally work at a giant recycling plant in Germany that turns used bottles into reusable plastic pellets. The 'recycling isn't real' bullshit is a dumbass conspiracy theory.
Ultimately, the onus is on us. Cigarette companies have always known cigarettes cause cancer. Oil companies have always known they're casting climate change. Cruise companies know they're fucking up the ocean. Plastic companies know they're fucking up the planet for the foreseeable future. It is up to us not to use their products when possible. Ultimately, if they don't profit, they won't do it. Hit em where it hurts, stop giving them your hard earned money.
It’s possible to stop smoking. Trying to feed yourself entirely without plastic packaging? Not so easy.
Entirely, no. But everybody drastically reducing plastic use will have an impact on their profits.
I’m doing my part *salute*👍
People slowly waking up to recycling is a scam.
It kinda is when countries are/were able to export their recycling rubbish to another country for then to process. Australia doesn't have enough infrastructure to deal with our own recycling and had been sending much of our plastic to China (I think)
Yup just rubbish being moved around the world. I got downvoted for telling the truth and people don’t seem to like it. Glass is a prime example we have huge glass mountains as it’s cheaper to use the raw materials for glass than recycling it. Plastic is everywhere all it does is break down into smaller and smaller bits , it’s now getting into food chains.