Recycling is mostly a scam. Most recycled trash is just dumped on third world countries.
Metal and paper recycling is super useful.
But yes, plastic recycling is a massive lie that probably does quite a bit more harm/waste than it would be just to throw it in the landfill
Metal and glass are recycleable. And if they do get into the environment, they are really just purified rocks and will gradually become sand in the weather. (Not that it’s great to have soda cans and broken glass in the sea, but to some extent it’s not as bad as microplastics).
Paper is recycleable.
Paper, wood, and other plant products (e.g. cotton) are biodegradable and come from plants that can be farmed.
In terms of sustainability it’s something like:
- Plant products
- Metal and glass
- Plastics
But also even more important than that, it’s far better to reuse something many times than to use single use products, regardless of the material they are made of.
This is wrong, please stop spreading this misinformation.
It probably differs from country to country, but in Germany, for example, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing. Falsely claiming that recycling is mostly a scam and, by that, implying that it doesn‘t make sense to try to recycle you trash, is a horrible idea and only makes the situation worse.
Germany is the best at recycling plastics in the world, yet they recycle less than half of all plastics... I won't call that misinformation based on this. Also please don't twist our words, we aren't saying recycling is a scam in general, just plastic recycling is a scam,
When we call plastic recycling a scam, we are advocating for not using plastics. Reduce, reuse, recycle, remember that.
Firstly, I‘m not twisting words, there is no mention of „plastic“ in the post I was replying to, just plain „recycling“.
Secondly, I’m sorry, but I really don‘t understand how a non-perfect rate makes plastic recycling a scam. Recycling is hard. There‘s no magic recycling machine, which just converts 100% of plastic waste to newly usable material. There are so many reasons for a less than perfect recycling rate (non-separated trash, contamination, badly designed packaging, technical limitations when sorting etc.pp.), that I find it just very strange and unhelpful to call it a scam without substantial support for that claim.
Sure, not using plastic would be best, but that‘s just more idealistic than realistic. I think that plastic is such an integral part of our lives right now, that it‘s not going to go away anytime soon. And that makes recycling, for now, an important step to reduce the total amount of plastic we use.
In addition to recycling quota OP also claimed that supposedly recycled trash is trash dumped on poor countries while it's actually a trash management issue. The first comment is just pure populistic misinformation as you said.
Also please don’t twist our words, we aren’t saying recycling is a scam in general, just plastic recycling is a scam,
Thread OP didn't specify that
Are you sure that's still the case? I know china stopped accepting it ages ago - that's why most recycling just goes to domestic landfill now.
It's still the case. India was a destination, too.
Even back then it just immediately started going other placed, eg Malaysia.
My area has recycling presort. So we have two bins that get picked up by the trucks. One garbage, one recycling. They dump them into the same hole on the truck. They drive the truck into the same building. The only thing the comes out of the building are loaded train cars. They all look the same. So all the neighbors presort their trash. And the trash company mixes them back together. Thanks trash company!
Basic economics dictates that recycling plastic isn't profitable otherwise industry would be doing it, itself. –That doesn't make it a scam. It's more like bad marketing.
Some of it will be truly recycled like with hdpe. Some will be used more conscientiously by being sent for plasma gasification. Lots of it will still get sent to the landfill, but that's better then sending all of it. Something rarely mentioned is that most plastics become less stable each time they're melted down, making them increasingly difficult to recycle.
It's believed that ~75% of all Aluminium that has ever been produced is still in use because it's economically more viable to recycle old aluminum than refine new. Alumium refinement is a highly energy intensive process.
Single stream recycling is a scam. Multi stream is much better. I recycle my paper and metals separately from glass and plastics for this reason. Wish there was an easy way to recycle glass too, but the collection networks aren't as widespread as the other two.
The cost to dispose or recycle should be paid by the companies that produce the product. Products would waste less material and recycling would be profitable for recycling companies doing a public service.
Yes, companies will want to make customers eat that cost. I don't know if there is a legislative solution for that or what.
IIRC, that's actually how it was set up to begin with, way back when we used glass bottles for Coke. Big companies manipulated us consumers into thinking we were being lazy for not taking care of recycling ourselves and that's how we got to this mess today.
People are like "but the plastic bottle is free and easy", and I'm like that's because all those costs are paid for later, by everyone. It's really frustrating but common short sightedness.
No one should be allowed to product something without a plan for disposing of it safely and without environmental cost. I'm willing to suffer the inconvenience of carrying a reusable bag if it means less environmental destruction.
If the companies try and make the consumer eat the cost, then the companies who sell their products in cardboard packaging instead of plastic will be able to sell it for cheaper and potentially steal business from the others. There are plenty of products sold in plastic which do not need to be.
You can literally just put a tax on new plastic bottles vs recycled plastic bottles and the issue solves itself, the issue with recycling is that it's not economically viable.
Update: AG Ken Paxton sues Texas resident for exposing lack of actual recycling at a Houston Center.
I fully support throwing AirTags, and really all Apple products, directly in the trash.
The iSheep are down voting you. 😆
Too in love with their gadgets to take a joke.
I’m actually not too sure about that. I am currently using an older iPhone (and I really dislike Apple, it’s just that the stupid device just does not stop working) and from an environmental perspective, throwing that away would surely be worse than continuing to use it, right?
This was already discovered some years back. The estimate of recyclables not being recycled was way beyond high. I can't remember the number so I'm not quoting it.
Demand corporations reconfigure their packaging operations instead of letting them gaslight into thinking we're the problem.
This is the answer. The best way to deal with the plastic problem is to stop producing it. The three R's are in the order they are for a reason. Recycling is the last thing to try.
One of the big issues with recycling plastics is that plastic has a very specific chemical makeup that gives it the properties it requires, and one major way to mess up that composition is heat. So, even if you can perfectly sort plastics into their respective types, simply heating them up to re-cast into pellets or something else can affect their properties to a state that they're not usable anymore. Add on top the fact that you will not be able to perfectly sort plastics by composition so you will always end up with a significant amount of impurity makes recycling very difficult.
Plastic companies created the 'recycling' efforts to get the public to believe their use of plastics wasn't as bad as it is. In reality, it is horrible for the environment.
I read the article, this is different from the other airtag exposes done on other recycling agencies: the plastic is still sitting on their property with a promise to be recycled later. They may break that promise at some point, but they haven’t yet, so the jury is still out IMO. Unlike other experiments like this where they find the airtags end up in a trash landfill or an incinerator.
Yeah, usually these companies just end up storing it all in a warehouse or a field until they go bankrupt, then the people behind that company start another company doing the same. And yeah, they promise they're working on technology to do the actual future recycling, but it never pans out.
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
^https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf^
I don't see any of those things reducing microplastics in the environment nor plastic being dumped in the rivers and ocean. The motivation behind recycling has very little to do with climate change.
Could just stop running one cruise ship for like 15 minutes.
And, we could enforce existing EPA regulations in a meaningful way upon industrial production.
Am I wrong I thinking that the CO2 emission from plastics is missing the point a bit. The issue in my mind is that the plastics remain in nature for a very long time with unknown health risks to us and the ecosystem.
When comparing a plastic bag vs a paper bag for shopping I hear the argument that making the paper bag has a lot more co2 emissions tied to it. But if I throw it in the bin it will be mulch before the end of the month.
The recycle bin? You mean the other landfill bin, right?
when I first moved into my current neighborhood we had a single truck collecting both bins but you could still get a fine for not sorting your 2nd landfill bin
AirTag in the trash. Quite fitting...
Plastic has multiple type that each require a different process for recycling.
Having a bunch of plastic all mixed up together needs people to manually separate them.
It's a joke.
So that’s what those things are worth for
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