Giving consumers a choice to recycle to better the environment doesn’t work and is dumb. Evidently, if I want to stop plastic pollution, I need to carefully sort my plastics, but only certain types with my garbage service. This ends up being about half of my purchases. The other half of plastics just go into my garbage bin for landfill. Nevermind the plastic number on each item.
Same with batteries! Everybody is just tossing them. I’m suppose to put tape in the ends and put them in a zip lock. People are not going to do this.
We need laws for the source of the issue instead of these fake fixes that rely on the consumer to “do good” that didn’t work.
It’s a measure put in place to make us feel better about it and then shift the responsibility and blame onto the citizenry. It’s not about about actually reducing plastic waste, you can only do that by using less plastic.
Its like helmet laws for cyclists. They exist, not to prevent head injuries but to shift responsibility for the injury from the State (infrastructure) and the driver to the cyclist. All of the best cycling places don’t have helmet laws as they massively undermine the uptake of cycling. They have infrastructure.
Jay walking is another example. People used to be allowed to walk in the street and cars were given the responsibility to stay under 10mph and not run down people. The auto industry lobbied for jaywalking laws so that the liabilities of their machine would be born by the pedestrian, not the owner of the machine.
Plastic pollution is therefore our fault because we didn’t recycle hard enough. When in reality it is our fault because all we really want is to feel good about it, not fix it.
You know what works? Bottle buyback programs.
You know who has lobbied heavily against bottle buyback programs? Coca-Cola.
It doesn’t even matter.
My entire state of individual people could recycle to high hell and it wouldn’t offset the corporations and data centers.
And in some cities in the state I live, they can’t process the recycling fast enough so it ends up in landfill anyway.
We need to hold the biggest contributors to the fire. That is the best use of our time and energy.
The whole idea was bastardized by corporates to avoid accountability and place the blame on the consumers for buying the products they sold to them.
And the plastic numbers are even worse. They deliberately designed the symbol to imply recycling categories, but only a couple can actually be recycled, and they generally aren’t even when you sort them and put them in the recycling bin.
Me: stops buying their products
Corps: wait no not like that
I don’t know what it’s like nowadays, but I was living in Germany around 2008-2010 and they had a great recycling program. You bought these clear yellow recycling bags that were sold at any store and put anything recyclable in it. No sorting required. Put it out with trash and they’d sort it all at the recycling center.
Every week I’d have 2-3 recycling bags and maybe one trash bag every other week. So much was recyclable, I almost didn’t have any real trash.
Then I moved back to the US and my local recycling service only collected type 1, 2, and 7 plastics. And aluminum cans. Paper/cardboard had to be manually dropped off at the nearest recycling center, batteries needed to go to a separate plant for processing. And if anything had touched food, if was ineligible for recycling.
Heck my current US recycling service only comes every other week. I have twice as much recycling as trash each week! My trash can is mostly empty every week, while my recycling is always overflowing. But they recycle so few products, they’ve decided it’s not worth hiring a team to collect every week. So annoying…
news flash. only about 1% of plastic in use today is recycled.
look up the history. npr has a good article iirc. companies introduced plastic recycling to make consumers feel less guilty.
better to not use plastic as much as possible
The whole Recycling concept is just what got propagated by the powers that be, because the two previous, much more fundamental principles are not conducive to profits:
Reduce, Reuse,Recycle.
Yeah I learned from trying to get people to recycle at work that half of people can’t follow the instructions for what goes on recycling and how even when they try. And of course you go one county over and the rules are different. sigh
It’s a good reminder that real change has to come from upstream. Making it the consumer’s responsibility just guarantees failure while giving everyone involved permission to just not give a fuck.
Hopefully whatever comes after this collapse of capitalism will resemble a circular economy more than this shit show.
What gets me is the public trash cans. All of those recyclables are going into the trash. Nobody is washing out and drying their containers before they dump it in the bag. They throw the bag away if there’s a single item in it that contaminates the lot. Ergo, the entire bag is always going to be thrown away. So, the unaware people ruin the bag, and the aware people glare at you for not using the bag that’s going to the trash anyway. Completely pointless.
Yeah I religiously rinse and dry mine because I don’t want even the chance of being more a part of he problem than I already am. It is so freakin hard to stay away from plastic if you don’t have discretionary income.
Wasting water to clean plastics that will probably just be trashed or burned isn’t necessarily better.
I can only control my side of it. Supposedly its supposed to get recycled.
It’s never been recyclable, that was always a lie to fool you into blaming yourself.
Not true. However due to fossil subsidies, new plastic is cheaper than recycled.
The process can be done. But the way it’s done in reality is shipping pressed chunks to China and if they’re dirty they’re not worth recycling. And any one thing in there can make the whole thing contaminated easily. And China doesn’t want to do that anymore.
This not how it’s done in the Netherlands. It used to be that way many years ago, but like you said, China isn’t buying anymore.
Hank Green made a video on this. As long as we extract fossil fuels at current rates, raw materials for new plastic just comes out as a byproduct. This would be true even without subsidies, unless the lack of subsidies made gas so expensive that people switched to other sources of energy.
Thanks for the source. This is something I’m well aware of. This is also the reason stuff gets double packaged today (six packs of beer wrapped in film), the packaging industry is constantly looking for stuff to push additional packaging to, raw materials are cheap, and if they don’t use them the oil industry will have a lot of waste.
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