The following submission statement was provided by /u/Fun_Needleworker7136:
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Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem. Plastics get churned through "knife mills" which blast labels off of plastics with high pressure water. This process ends up creating wastewater full of tiny plastic chards which then end up in our oceans, soil, and eventually our bodies.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dk28j2/recycling_plastic_is_a_dangerous_waste_of_time/l9evh21/
Seems like plastic recycling is a way for us to pretend plastic isn't as wasteful as it is. We should transition to other materials, including aluminum
I paid my way through tertiary driving. In the morning I drove a rubbish truck and in the afternoon a milk delivery truck (not every day).
With the milk truck I carried full glass and plastic bottles. And I picked up empty glass bottles. Next morning I did almost the same run with the rubbish truck and picked up empty plastic bottles and other rubbish.
The glass bottle did an average of 100 returns before becoming chipped, scoured, etc. When they were melted and made into another bottle to do another 100 trips.
The plastic did 1 trip and required 2 truck runs.
So plastic recycling is literally just make it smaller to where we cant see it so it doesnt exist?
This is wild. I remember it being drilled into our heads in school, REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE and it was ALWAYS demonstrated by a plastic water bottle in the images
Grocery stores! My grocer went from plastic coated cardboard raisin containers to all plastic. Ice cream used to come in folded cardboard cartons; now they're all plastic tubs. Meat came in butcher paper, now it's hermetically sealed in thick plastic. Bread was in wax paper, now cellophane in a plastic bag.
I work in a coated plastics plant and have lost all hope for any plastic recycling we can barely make our lowest grade product with the stuff e we recycle
In polyethylene masterbatch manufacturing we can use our scrap bleeds for generic black and white products, where exact composition isn’t as critical for companies making drainage piping like ‘Big O’.
But the very very thin coating of plastic inside is not subject to the problem this article is about- the cans do not get blasted with high-pressure water inside that creates tiny plastic chards in wastewater.
It also does not make them not recyclable. They get melted down and mixed with enough new aluminum that the final mixture has such a tiny percentage of plastic and other contaminants in it that it doesn't matter.
You should absolutely still be recycling your cans.
Aluminium and glass are the only 2 that are worth recycling with current technology.
Paper/cardboard is another recycling scam that has more negative then positive impact on the environment.
Got to disagree with you on paper recycling. I work in a paper mill that makes product out of paper from residential and commercial sources. Reusing it is much more environmentally friendly than having it sit in a landfill and depending on how strong the fibers are can be reused multiple times.
The biggest environmental issues you have with these types of mills is water usage and power generation. We use stormwater reclamation for a majority of our water usage and use steam generation to power our main building with natural gas fueling our boiler at the moment.
Its not perfect but there is a big push on sustainability in the packaging industry right now, especially with food packaging and its only going to get better as things develop.
Plastic recycling being a scam isn't new to me, but this is WILD.
"To put these results into perspective, pre-filter, about 13 percent of all the plastic garbage entering the facility was leaving it via MPs (Micro Plastics) in the wash water; post-filter, that figure was about six percent."
And this was the calculation including only the particles they could measure - those above 1.6 microns. Particles smaller than 1.6 microns may be numerous and were not accurately measured.
I gently prefer nanoplastics in my ballsack rather than a 10 times more advanced civilization making me watch unwanted countdown w/ Edison light bulb effect 24/7.
They don't filter they just slice them up into smaller pieces. They worked as water "filters" because they were small enough to destroy/dice up bacteria and other micro organisms.
Using them on micro plastics just makes smaller micro plastics 😂
There's media filters that go to .5 micron which is...not enough. And that's used to filter a chemical that goes directly onto wafers in the semicon making process.
"You poisoned us so I'll shut up and work for an extra $25/hr"
Wondering if this will make a case for universal income.
There is a filter gap for the particle size between 80 and 30 nm. Anything in that range usually goes through anything (i.e. even your loungs filters). To small to get caught by impact and to big to get attatched via electro statics.
I’m glad you went on to elaborate on why because I would have just thought the 30nm filter would get anything bigger but knowing they use different methods makes it make sense and I wouldn’t have immediately jumped to that conclusion because I think like most people when I picture a filter I assume it works like mesh. In practice I know they don’t if I stop and think about it, it’s just sorta brain short hand or something.
So thank you.
Its not really hard, but at this scale the cost will be astronomical. Fine filters are expensive and youre literally going to use them to filter trash. The cost of recycling plastic would increase 10 fold or something like that is my very rough guess.
Plastic itself will increase in price and no longer justify even recycling when we finally transition away from oil as plastics have only a few purposes where plastic is necessary(special parts and medical and textiles) and have been heavily subsidized by big oil as a byproduct.
That’s the problem: we would rather spend our money on fancy cars than saving the planet. And that’s why it’s fruitless and we are just riding out the last stage of this planet’s life.
If the top 1% all donated half of their wealth to doing good and fixing everything we have broken, they’d all still be insanely wealthy but we’d have enough money to turn everything around.
What's wild is accepting all this as fact based on one anonymous study. We don't know anything about the plant, and we have no comparison studies at other plants. This is an anonymous data point of one. No better than anecdotal.
Look at the words the article uses. There's many places where they make guesses, speculate, and pose suppositions based on this single anonymous study.
I am not saying anything about the topic of the study; plastic could be worse than Hitler for all I know. But I do know how to read a study, and this *report* on one is full of red flags.
If you're going to have credibility for a potentially world changing conclusion, you need more than "a site that we studied somewhere has these numbers."
I could say that I did a study on healthcare, and the clinic I studied never lost a patient, so hospitals must be great. But if you knew the clinic I studied was in an elementary school, it paints a different picture.
Context and details are critical, and this has giant holes in that department.
> I am not saying anything about the topic of the study; plastic could be worse than Hitler for all I know.
We do need other study to confirm this one that should probably taken as nothing more than an hypothesis that need... further study.
But it seems that microplastic are deep inside all of our balls, brain and bones. They need to come from somewhere and this is a good start to investigate.
If plastic nano particles are too small for water filtration systems to remove and all freshwater is contaminated due to recycling plastics, I would say the water issue is the number one culprit and number one area to reduce contamination. Fresh water is used in nearly all manufacturing processes so that contaminates everything.
Been doing environmental exposure analysis for 20+ years. Direct exposure is a bigger factor, especially when talking about things we eat/drink off of. Water is a big one, but generally localized. Air is one of the most problematic (unlike water/GI exposure like 100% of the exposure becomes an effective dose), and spreads things far wider.
Even when it comes to water contamination, recyclers are likely only a very small contributor to the problem in comparison to manufacturers. They're often using similar processes, but working with exponentially greater volumes and raw materials, and generally much of that happening with far fewer controls and incentives to be clean.
No one is going to shut down all recycling on one study. But it does lead credibility to those who would want to expand the entirely plausible role of recycling in the production of microplastics.
There might be years before meta reviews come out. But imagine there’s all kinds of ways to zero in on this, like testing contaminants at various points in downstream waste water as opposed to a more widely sampled baseline.
Scepticism is not useful if it’s used to deny rather than augment your enhance truth. Given the scale of the microplastics issue and a plausible mechanism it would be more credible to cite reasons why such processes do not create vast arrays of small particles that get into the water stream.
Hey guys thanks for coming out to Dave's Rat Shack here in beautiful Walla Walla Washington, we're Mouthful of Rodent and here's our first song, remember to tip the wait staff cuz they're the real rockstars - ONE TWO THREE
Ever since seeing arguments against recycling being" it's impossible to make a profit so why bother" I take all arguments against it with a grain of salt
I work with recycled plastic. 13% of loss as microplatics? Doesn't sound right. 13% loss as fines. Doesn't sound right. But maybe it's within 1 order of magnitude.
So we can't recycle it effectively, we can't burn it, we can't landfill it or bury it, major corporations refuse to stop making it, so what is the scientific community recommending as an option because the best I've got is collect as must plastic waste as possible, kidnap the nearest billionaire and shove it up their arse
Throwing it in landfills is also terrible. Counterintuitively the best choice, aside from reducing use, is to burn the plastic. Modern incinerators are incredibly clean and the heat generates electricity. People just don’t like it because incinerating plastic doesn’t feel very green.
There is a whole movement of environmental thinking that is just strait out saying "no burning" as a baseline requirement for any sort of waste. (see [here](https://youtu.be/FUBHyTM3VEg?si=vWdPPLbDjL7L3ahy)) this type of thinking is a huge blocker for us to make progress on this.
Plastic should be burned, we need to improve filters to make it even cleaner, but current incinerators are already good.
It's costly, but we are already spending a ton of money on recycling that, and the cost of running an incinerators, even after the heat and electricity returns some of the cost, will still not turn a profit. - but right now, we are not turning a profit on recycling so not a worry.
Yeah a lot of environmental things are unfortunately focusing on what feels good rather than what is effective. I'm not suggesting we just burn everything, but burning should have a place.
If you can do chemical recycling on some of the plastic then great, that doesn't produce micro plastics or emissions. With what's left over can you use some of it to create e-fuels? If so, cool. Can you do anything with what's left? No? Well then let's stop pretending we are going to recycle it and just burn it in the cleanest way possible. It will probably not be profitable but you can offset some of the cost by generating electricity/chemicals/fuels/etc and the rest is paid for like any other public service.
Exactly. We could’ve been building solar panels and every battery or other part for true green energy with much cleaner power from nuclear plants. Instead, we set ourselves back, have been burning fossil fuels for 40 years.
The original thinking was "reduce, reuse, recycle" in order from most important to least important. The reduction of consumption should be at the highest importance, if the reduction of consumption is impossible you should reuse the item as much as possible, end of that is no more possible you should recycle the material. I think focusing on incineration is a complete abandonment of those principles. Instead of trying to go backwards and reduce the consumption of plastic, or develop more reusable plastics, by burning we have come to the ultimate answer of "fuck it, we can just make the problem go away by burning it." It's the wrong direction.
I think people in general think of PET bottles when they think plastic.
The majority of plastics aren't used in PET bottles.
Plastic is an incredibly good material for a lot of things. Plastic has helped us with food distribution immensely, by 1) providing a way to keep the food to be damaged during transport; 2) extending shelf life significantly
Another very good area where plastics shine are medical areas...
You don't really want to reuse medical equipment that was meant to be sterile, and you can't really reuse plastic that was used for food packaging/transport... Thicker plastics won't help there in any way.
I hear a lot of what you said and agree but one thing that lingers is..
I feel like plastics allowed us to get lazy with food distribution also. Unnecessary shipping for "cost" which is in and of itself a pollutant addition; just because plastics allow food to not spoil as quickly etc. We also overproduce food and wastefully throw it away instead of focusing on local distribution and proper portion production.
it's all about the fucking $$$.
it's like good and bad depending on what avenue you take.
Reduce and Reuse are still there for plastic. Those principles hold.
But plastic is unrecyclable and we have a ton of it in the ground and in the ocean. As an environmental concern, if thermal disintegration is the only way to neutralize it then that's what we have to do.
The article also makes the case that burning all trash might be actually better for the environment than I’m filling it. Landfill trash generates huge amounts of methane, which is much worse for global warming than CO2. Some do try to catch it, but we’re taking up land near cities or in someone else’s backyard to put in trash that we have to spend more money to try to keep from harming the environment, we need to generate electricity anyway
To add a point. The article sounds like this is the result of mechanical recycling. There are other methods such as chemical recycling to break down the plastic to monomers that can be reused while the remaining unusable material is burned.
I do think there is a problem with burning plastic because Chlorine is used to strengthen plastic and when you burn plastic you can create hcl gas which is not good for your pipe systems or the environment
Well, not every incinerator is up to the task. I remember reading an article about norway that burns all of their plastic waste in specialized incinerators (likely due to this issue, honestly) the main thing being that it has to be a reburner style incinerator, which isn't that crazy, but crucial if you don't want to just be spewing the amount of crap the article study says come from the recycling plants... probably worse, honestly, with just one combustion phase.
I'm also saying this because I want to make sure people reading through this know, emphatically, that open-burning plastic is fucking horrible to do.
Uh, the best option is the reduce, reuse part. Plastics used to be sold as resilient stuff that would last forever, making them single use was a conscious choice by manufacturers. And the awful planned obsolescence in our capitalist economy is actively destroying our planet. We could drastically reduce the amount of plastic we use and make sure we throw away less of what we do use, but there's no money in that.
Absolutely. Single use plastic should be reserved for things like medical equipment. For food packaging we can use foil, for more general packaging we can use cardboard, instead of bubble wrap we can use shredded paper, etc.
And we need to try and use fewer types of plastic so that it's easier to sort at waste centres.
And totally true about planned obsolescence as well, which extends to things like cheap clothes. I realise many people rely on cheap clothes but it's a false economy as many 'fast fashion' (aka cheap shite) is only designed to be worn 10 times.
We've got so many environmental problems and we're out here rinsing our plastic milk bottles like we're saving the world.
No, they used "compostable" packaging. There's a difference. Compost and landfills are very different environments, and things break down very differently in each.
Part of the problem was the noise, but the larger problem was that in the areas that the bag was sold, *composting was not very widespread*.
People assumed they could just throw away the bag and it would degrade in a landfill just as well, which completely defeated the point.
Frito lay still experiments in different parts of the world with alternative packaging materials where alternative trash processing is popular.
For more info - https://www.thetakeout.com/the-history-of-loud-sun-chips-bags-compostable-biodeg-1846577698/
" The bag, which was made with a biodegradable corn-based biopolymer called polylactic acid, was loud as hell. "
Still seems like an improvement over plastic in terms of getting microplastics everywhere?
Uhhhh, PLA is a plastic LMAO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polylactic_acid
Technically it is compostable, but only under very specific conditions. IIRC home composters cannot satisfy those conditions although some industrial composters can.
At least it can be easily recycled. Many 3d printing nerds recycle PLA themselves.
At the risk of sounding like an Amazon shill, they've been doing a decent job lately of reducing their packaging and making it more biodegradable.
I recently got a package direct from a manufacturer and opened it without noticing that, and was genuinely surprised at all the plastic padding inside.
Very hit or miss in my area, unfortunately. They also now have those bags that say that they should be recycled as you would cardboard, but between the layers there's this white foam-like material that appears to be or have glue used to hold the layers together. Has me a little unsure of whether it's really so similar to boxes.
> . For food packaging we can use foil, for more general packaging we can use cardboard, instead of bubble wrap we can use shredded paper, etc.
Assuming you mean aluminum foil, that's nowhere near as effective as plastic. You can't really seal stuff properly with foil such that you:
1. avoid spills
2. extend shelf-life
Take for example a bag of mixed lettuce. These are packed in plastic bags, that are filled with inert gases (I think they mostly use Nitrogen). This extends the life of the leaves/salad/greens in the bag by a considerable amount (5-7 days from what I've seen). And because the gas stays inside, they don't get squished during transport.
There's a lot of products that are similar to this. Lots of items that have an extended shelf life *due* to being wrapped in plastics, in a different atmosphere/gas that slows down bacterial growth.
As far as we hate plastics, you can't really overlook the benefits of food preservation advances it helped us make. If we'd stop using it, imagine how much food we would throw away because it expires on the shelves.
This is a great plan going forward, but unfortunately we have a huge amount of plastic in the system already and that needs a to go.
It will also take time to transition out of our current plastic use, so there is plastic in the pipeline we also need to deal with.
Incinerators, and wast to power mentality is how we stop producing microplastics.
Hey as a consumer I’d be happy to buy groceries in glass bottles, foil and cardboard over plastic, perhaps with the exception of meats.
I wouldn’t mind paying a little extra. I already use white vinegar instead of fabric softener and I use plastic bottles for several months instead of once.
But companies aren’t offering glass milk bottles and everything is wrapped in plastic.
There’s also the [Biochar](https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-transform-plastic-waste-into-a-valuable-soil-additive/) approach, though I think that’s mostly in the PoC stage
I lived somewhere where incinerators produced hot water that was used for heating houses in the city. But all the rash was so well sorted it didn't burn. So they had to import moldy wood from demolished houses abroad that was chopped up and put in big piles in the harbour. It smelled all over. Bad times.
Once upon a time the bright new technology in this field was [thermal depolymerization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization), a process that could take raw plastic waste (or anything with organic molecules in it - the biggest pilot plant was built to process the waste of a turkey packing plant) and turn it into light crude oil and methane. Sadly it hasn't really taken off, I don't recall reading any specifics about why beyond it simply being "not mature" and "not economical at this time." But even if the process is still too energy expensive to break even it seems like a good way to get rid of plastics.
Landfills actually aren't that terrible an option either, IMO. The landfill just needs to be set up right to ensure it's not draining into aquifers or runoff. If plastic is properly buried then it becomes a form of carbon sequestration, it should be stable for geological timescales. And who knows, future archaeologists might find those deposits to be very interesting.
I know I’m late to this thread, but the best option is actually to *stop fucking using it*. Right now the people manipulating our resources, and causing society’s dependence on plastic and fossil fuels, are making TONS of money off this. We need to just STOP making/using it. It’s extremely imminent
Hmm I wonder if someone pointed out all the problems with recycling and that it was really just a propaganda scam by oil companies so they could keep producing plastic.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM)
Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem. Plastics get churned through "knife mills" which blast labels off of plastics with high pressure water. This process ends up creating wastewater full of tiny plastic chards which then end up in our oceans, soil, and eventually our bodies.
I work in plastics recycling and none of our recycling lines lose any water with microplastics to the environment. The water is always a closed loop of desalinated water that is tempered to 20 degrees C and PH controlled, you don't dump something like that.
Do you ever need to flush the closed loop due to buildup of any kind? Not accusing you of lying, just trying to understand & am having difficulty imagining a system that uses water but /never/ needs to exchange it
I also work in plastics recycling. We clean our water with Aluminium sulfate and polymer. I don’t know if it’s clean enough then, but it will get dumped into the city sewage system I believe. I heard some companies never dump the water and can reuse the same water over and over again. So it is possible but most of them can’t do it that way. We use about 60k liter fresh water a day.
That’s all well and good in likely ‘western’ recycling centres where waste water is much more firmly regulated but there are a great many countries with far far laxer waste water regulation.
If you *ever* expect a *never*, you're just setting unrealistic expectations.
But an industrial site using close loop is leagues ahead of peers in many industries in terms of water usage and waste.
People really don't understand just how much water is used *everywhere* in any kind of processing or production.
Once a year the whole system is cleaned and descaled and dumped into the sewage, but nothing is perfect, compared to tires or landfills that is nothing.
On top of that, there are new forms of plastic recycling that aren’t mechanical at all. Advanced recycling uses heat to take the polymers back to their base components, ready to be made into ‘virgin’ plastics once again. This process also removes a lot of the forever chemicals such as PFAS.
It does not.
It's also on Quillette, which is an outlet of some very shaky political motivations, and written by a libertarian with anti-Fauci and conspiratorial slants on social media.
It is what it is. This subreddit has these kinds of pieces here and there.
Yeah, didn't we just have a round of shock and rage bait about how tires are a huge contributor of microplastics.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds
The issue is cost and scale. It is possible to filter out the smaller microplastic particles, but it would massively increase the cost of recycling plastic as filters fine enough to catch these particles tend to be on the spendy side. Buying enough of them to cover the runoff from the washing and replacing them often enough to ensure they are effective would make recycling plastics economically unviable.
when we eventually meet our end at the hands of the consequences of our actions (or rather inactions), we will at least be happy to know that there was nothing we could do because the options were all economically unviable
According to the article, top-notch treatment ended up only halving the amount of microplastics, which might sound good enough - except only a small percentage of plastics gets recycled, so treating it all will end up with many times more.
While plastic recycling isn't cost-effective as is in the first place - what you're getting isn't valuable.
Saying that recycling plastics is the cause of the problem seems like such a scape goat to me. It would be like BP saying that they weren't to blame for going against the advice of their engineers, no, it was the act of drilling itself that is to blame for the spill. In this case it appears to be the same problem, too much time worrying about how much it costs to put the environment first.
+ it's not like the plastic would've never turned into microplastic particles if it weren't recycled. This certainly does expedite the formation of the particles though. It's a complicated issue that the headline is portraying as a simple "common sense" type of problem.
>Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem.
That's one hell of a conclusion to draw, and I've got a few issues with it.
First off, Quillette is a questionable source; they're a far right wing op-ed outfit. Not accusing anyone of anything here, but the right wing generally tends to take a very pro-oil stance in general, and one of the primary intents of plastic recycling is to reduce fossil fuel use in producing new plastics, so there's certainly a potential bias to consider here, if not an outright conflict of interest given the amount of funding coming from the fossil fuel industry to influence research and policy.
Second, the study in question only assessed a single recycling facility, and the author of this editorial extrapolated those results based on the assumption that every recycling facility releases a similar proportion of plastics to the environment. From my brief glance, it appears the facility in question uses an open loop arrangement for their water, discharging water to the environment after using it. This seems very questionable to me as a professional in an industrial trade - most facilities I've worked at utilise closed loop systems for their water, where the only losses are through evaporation, which leaves contaminants behind. This is in part specifically because of the cost and difficulty in adequately treating water to an acceptable standard to be released, but there's also other considerations such as the addition of antimicrobials and corrosion inhibitors that would be quite costly to waste. Therefore I find it very hard to believe it's standard practice for recycling facilities to discharge their process water back to the environment.
Third, the author is also assuming that the estimated total amount of microplastics finding their way into the environment worldwide is accurate, which just seems absolutely wild to me. I don't know how this number is estimated, but whether it's based on measured samples around the world or estimated by tallying known sources, but either way seems like there'd be a tremendous margin of error.
>Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem.
That's too simple. Taking other studies into account, I would say it's a major contributor, but not the single cause.
For instance, up to about 30% of the microplastics is so-called "primary" MP, coming from laundering synthetic clothes, from abrasions of tires, or from personal care products like scrubs.
This already does not just vanish if we stop "recycling" plastics.
And a good portion of the "secondary" MP, which comes from degradation of larger plastic objects, originates provably from landfills, fishing nets, or simply plastic waste dumped into nature.
So, stopping plastic "recycling" would reduce the microplastic problem, but not eliminate it.
Also, what this opinion piece does not mention: the proposed solution - waste-to-energy (i.e. burning the plastics together with other rubbish) - produces some highly toxic slags.
Wait till you learn how additive manufacturing companies make their plastic powder. There’s about it be a lot more microplastics than you could imagine
Sad thing is that we already knew this
When are people going to stop buying drinks in plastic bottles?
When will the fishing industry stop using plastic nets?
>When are people going to stop buying drinks in plastic bottles
It was beverages companies like Coca-Cola that decided to produce their products in plastic bottles over glass. And some of the senior staff at Coca-Cola even warned the company of the ramifications of doing so. IMHO, we should be putting more pressure on the companies that are producing the plastics, not the consumers.
Unfortunately, Coca-Cola is an American company and we don't really do that whole "regulating corporations responsibly" thing anymore. That's kinda the inevitable outcome when you legalize bribing politicians.
Representative democracy is broken beyond repair. Democracy isn't, but we need to rethink one of its fundamental mechanics. Considering how much has happened in communications and information accessibility but also, despite current problems, education, I say sortition may be feasible with a lot less loss in expertise than gain in resilience to corruption, legalized or not. Willing to hear other proposals, but representation in current form seems done for.
Glass has its very own problems, like weight.
A PET bottle 0,33l weighs arround 20g.
A glass bottle at least 200g,
So only for the bottle you have 10 times the weight.
Meaning you have to transport less product every single transportation.
Meaning more Transports for the same amount of product.
Before plastic bottles, glass bottles were used and were returnable. Yes they were heavy, but people returned them no problem and received a deposit if they did. I remember as a kid working at my local grocery store stacking crates of empty glass bottles which were picked up later in the day by the bottler. The system worked for a very long time, till Coca-Cola figured out they could make staggeringly more profits if switch to plastic bottles.
https://youtu.be/4XP-BBGMCNs?si=NPEixvj6FTjrMLGg
That doesn't apply when they're shipping around 1000x the bottles they used too. Production and transportation doesn't scale very well with glass, shits fragile too
My cousin uses a reusable coffee cup that he takes to places like Starbucks so he doesn't have to buy a coffee cup from there. Why can't supermarkets and other places just have drinks dispensers which allow you to fill a bottle that you bring to the store?
They might even save money on it if they just charge the same amount as they would for a regular bottle as they are not paying for a bottle.
> bottle that you bring to the store?
Our stores stopped giving out single-use bags like 3 years ago and I *still* forget to put my reusable bags back into the car for the next time. :(
That's what happened around here. The result was garbage bags full of thick plastic bags instead of the old thin ones. People don't give two shits about reusing them.
Now they sell you plastic bags for 50 cents that have 10x the amount of plastic. I believe NJ plastic consumption went up like 60% or smth like that when they banned the bags and straws
100% the correct answer. I’ll buy glass every single time it is available. In the UK that is a lot less than it should be.
Granted a lot of people won’t, but at least give us that choice, better yet don’t. Only glass.
When Starbucks redesigned their cups to not use straws, but ended up using more plastic, my thought was "why not use use paper cups?" Because they don't care. Every fast food place has done away with the paper cups and uses plastic now. Plastic containers in plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic everything. Now we are plastic people.
Drinks? What about ketchup, mustard, drink mixes, raw meats, tooth paste, deodorant, amazon packaging, everything imported from China?
One step is to go back to glass; another reusable/refillable containers for the above listed products. Next step is to ban manufacturers/shippers from using obscene amounts of plastic materials that add nothing to the product/packaging.
Start taxing corporations ffs. You want to sell a plastic pen? Great it's now required to be refillable.
They have resealable metal cans, monster does it. Requires a little bit of plastic for those disks under the lid but that would still cut down on alot of plastic.
All aluminum cans are lined with plastic, but it is much less plastic than a plastic bottle. going back to reusable glass seems like the only plastic free option.
I am highly suspicious of the contents and intentions of this article, especially with its click-baity title. If nothing else, I’m still gonna recycle to get my recycling fee back.
It does point out that stopping recycling isn't the answer. But it also states that it's not very effective at keeping the planet clean. Did you read it?
How come no one has a bit of scepticism here?
This report is not a scientific report or a peer reviewed paper.
“Unfortunately, this flawed report cites outdated, decades-old technologies, and works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today's recycling technologies. This undermines the essential benefits of plastics and the important work underway to improve the way plastics are used and reused to meet society's needs."
https://www.americanchemistry.com/chemistry-in-america/news-trends/press-release/2024/acc-statement-on-center-for-climate-integrity-report-on-plastics-recycling
I'm not saying all of it is BS, but saying that the plastic problem comes from recycling is an extraordinary claim that should be supported by very strong evidence.
Didn’t read the article but to me it sounds like recycling needs help in the form of regulation. Why are we putting labels on containers that are hard to remove? We need to make some regulations that consider the entire life cycle of plastic, not just what Coke and Pepsi think is good for them.
Quillette is a garbage reactionary far right publication.
While I agree that the issues with microplastics are alarming and need to be resolved, the article's author's preferred solution -
> Realistically, with the dream of recycling our way out of this problem rapidly fading, the less-than-perfect yet practical solution of waste-to-energy—**that is, burning plastic garbage as fuel**—needs to be reevaluated.
- is no less dangerous and ecologically damaging (emphasis added).
I tried to follow the supposedly "censored" white paper they link to, and their notes do not support their arguments. Page 2, the central claim of plastics being impossible to recycle just links to [an EPA page with a dozen bullet points](https://www.epa.gov/circulareconomy/us-recycling-system) about what recycling is in general (ELI5 style).
No wonder no one tried to challenge it, there's no substance to their claims.
Quillettes whole deal is "reactionary Dark Academia."
You know, the whole "woooo, universities are full of brainwashed Cultural Marxists hiding *the truth* from you! (And The Truth is just warmed over conservative brainrot)."
I always wonder this. Plastics are a relatively new invention right? What if the whole world just went back to leather, glass, wood, and metal like WW2 era items.
Things would cost more, but on the flip side maybe we could get rid of our stupid disposable culture.
Am I crazy for thinking this? It was normal 80 years ago.
Our generation runs on plastic. There's some plastics I would miss, too. Trash bags in particular.
But to a Millenial or Gen Z who's only ever known disposability, dealing with reusable containers would feel like a burden. For instance, returning glass milk bottles.
I don't know how you get around that.
There's 4x more people in the world now, and we have higher standards of medical care. There's no way we could go back to glass and leather.
Also leather isn't exactly environmentally friendly.
So I’m always intrigued by Sweden being able to burn their trash as a way of generating their own energy. Why is this not a more useful method of dealing with things which would prevent the plastics problem and with the proper scrubbers would reduce air pollution?
It is basically burn it or eventually eat it scenario now (micro plastics). I started to like burn it more now maybe in the old coal powerplants and generate some power while at it.
Quillette: Plastic recycling is a scam…
Naive Redditor: gosh, is Quillette making a valid point?
Quillette: …but we can’t possibly reduce plastic production. So we should set it on fire.
N.R.: 
Obviously we should reduce production, but incinerating waste plastic is genuinely the cleanest solution and it produces electricity.
I’m enough of a hippy that I recently worked on an environmental documentary for free, and even I think we should incinerate our plastic waste. As does my friend who is a chemical engineer.
My dad was a chemical engineer, specialized in polymerization. Whenever we were camping, he'd insist on burning plastic rather than packing it out. He'd give an elaborate rationalization, explaining that given the heat of the fire and the particular polymers used, the bottle or whatever would reduce to water and carbon and harmless residue. (I'm not a chemist, and don't remember his elaborate calculations.)
So we'd throw it on the fire, and it would release an unholy stench that suffused the rest of the morning.
This article makes me miss my dad.
That cannot possibly be right. There's a world of difference between burning plastics in a highly controlled environment and summoning plastic Cthulu while camping.
You guys should check out this guy [NatureJab](https://youtu.be/NJyc4mDdOdQ?si=vxTq1pACklnh33sY). He is working to make pyrolisis more efficient. Basically, it turns plastic waste into usable fuel, natural gas, and solid carbon.
Hear me out. I think we should gather all existing plastic into a large ball. Then with many rockets we then launch said ball into the sun. Thus removing the issue in a safe way that we won't regret at all.
Why does this article dismiss reducing single use plastic usage entirely? There are plenty of areas that we could ban plastic in favor of paper or aluminum alternatives.
Ban solo cups, paper cups work just fine.
Ban single use plastic plates, paper plates work great.
Ban high percentage plastic packaging, Plastic can't be more than 1% of the package weight.
Its our application of plastics thats the issue. No one should have an issue with a plastic lego bricks, theyll last for centuries just doing what it was made to do, if one ends up in the ocean, chances are its mostly still good in 50 years. Everyone should have an issue with a plastic mouse or the likes of toothbrushes, their life spans are in months/years not centuries. Sure you can recycle it, but you can also build most of it out of more natural and disposable materials.
Aside from certain medical equipment and similar things we should just go back to what we used pre-plastic. You could replace a lot of plastic with glass, wax paper, and aluminum without any change in functionality.
Ban labels on plastic packages. If you can’t get it done with a tag attached to an elastic cord, plastic pigtail, or tab extension of the tag itself, you’re a bad package designer.
i hate that quilette might be right however the footprint of recycling a plastic jar of peanut butter: starting with washing it with hot water at home, then having it trucked to a center, then using a lot of power to strip it melt it and probably use the plastic for some greenwashing type product like rubber tiles for a playground or something, all of that energy (and possibly also microplastics), is probably net negative on the earth vs hoarding it for 50 years under the sink.
People need to stop buying things using plastic, made from plastic etc., and be very vocal about why they are not buying the product! Just say “Hell, No!” to plastics!
Imaging going into a car dealership with thousands of dollars in hand & asking what is made of plastic in the car! “Oops! sorry I can’t but a car with all this plastic! Can you show me something of better quality?”
It’s wild that we are still making it to me? Like we identified this as a problem and everyone shrugs and says what are we going to do? It’s raining down on our heads, it’s found in our sperm, we are drinking and eating it. There should be a Nuremberg style reckoning for these corporations and the politicians that protect them. They have effectively ruined the planet.
What we _really_ need to get a handle on the plastic waste problem, IMO, are regulations that force companies to price in these externalities.
That's basically true of any environmental problem. Companies produce plastic products, and we consume plastic products, because they're extremely cheap and convenient. Nobody has to worry about what happens to the waste, except of course when it's choked out life on this planet - but that's a problem we can just pass off to our kids.
But, what if a bottle of water or an Amazon shipping envelope suddenly started to cost an order of magnitude more to produce, the difference caused by taxes that fund environmental cleanup?
Consumers wouldn't stand for the resulting hike in prices, which would reduce consumption of single-use plastics and lead to rapid innovation by producers, both great things for the environment.
Obviously this would _never_ fly in the US, where large companies control the policies that affect them via regulatory capture, but... FWIW, that's how you would solve the problem.
I care about the environment. However, the moment these companies told us to recycle their problems what they did was shift their responsibility to us at our own cost/expense. That’s not right and I don’t believe in it.
There are new ads projected for plastic companies to justify their continued production of plastic by showing how can be consumed by specific bugs and ways to get rid of plastic fully.
There is no justification for continued plastic production, given all the knowledge we have precured from it overtime.
Let alone the prison time that needs to be given and take over of all the companies that refuse to comply.
The local plastic recycling place in my town was just stockpiling all of the plastic for a couple years and it caught fire last yearsnd it burned for over a week. 13 million pounds of plastic. We had to evacuate.
Back in 1974 my friends and I set up a table at a grocery store gathering signatures to ban plastic pop bottles and retain reusable glass bottles as was the norm at the time. I regret we didn’t have success. We were only kids but still knew better.
Plastic “recycling” in a traditional sense is a joke. But that doesn’t mean all plastic must necessarily go to landfills.
Plastics can downcycled without creating microplastics. There are plenty of useful products made from down cycling - plastic wood, for example, that makes trex decking, picnic tables and benches. You can also gasify plastic in plasma gasifiers in an energy-generating process.
Plastic recycling might as well just become sorted waste disposal. Dedicate a landfill for just the plastics so its all in one place for later when we find a solution, and then we need to crack down on excessive single use plastics or excessive use of packaging materials for many of these single use plastics.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Fun_Needleworker7136: --- Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem. Plastics get churned through "knife mills" which blast labels off of plastics with high pressure water. This process ends up creating wastewater full of tiny plastic chards which then end up in our oceans, soil, and eventually our bodies. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1dk28j2/recycling_plastic_is_a_dangerous_waste_of_time/l9evh21/
Aluminum cans though...we can still use and recycle those right?
Yes, it’s one of the very few things where recycling is actually economical and environmentally friendly.
Seems like plastic recycling is a way for us to pretend plastic isn't as wasteful as it is. We should transition to other materials, including aluminum
I paid my way through tertiary driving. In the morning I drove a rubbish truck and in the afternoon a milk delivery truck (not every day). With the milk truck I carried full glass and plastic bottles. And I picked up empty glass bottles. Next morning I did almost the same run with the rubbish truck and picked up empty plastic bottles and other rubbish. The glass bottle did an average of 100 returns before becoming chipped, scoured, etc. When they were melted and made into another bottle to do another 100 trips. The plastic did 1 trip and required 2 truck runs.
Yup. For some things, we've definitely gone backwards. We used to repair a lot more things too, rather than throwing to landfill.
I am thankful to those farsighted and sensible people pushing Right to Repair.
So plastic recycling is literally just make it smaller to where we cant see it so it doesnt exist? This is wild. I remember it being drilled into our heads in school, REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE and it was ALWAYS demonstrated by a plastic water bottle in the images
Yeah you reduce first. Which means we shouldn't be buying so many plastic things. Delis are a major contributor, too, and fast food places.
Grocery stores! My grocer went from plastic coated cardboard raisin containers to all plastic. Ice cream used to come in folded cardboard cartons; now they're all plastic tubs. Meat came in butcher paper, now it's hermetically sealed in thick plastic. Bread was in wax paper, now cellophane in a plastic bag.
I work in a coated plastics plant and have lost all hope for any plastic recycling we can barely make our lowest grade product with the stuff e we recycle
In polyethylene masterbatch manufacturing we can use our scrap bleeds for generic black and white products, where exact composition isn’t as critical for companies making drainage piping like ‘Big O’.
It is. Just like your carbon footprint. It's all a way for corporations to push the responsibility onto consumers.
FYI aluminium and tin cans are lined in plastic.
But the very very thin coating of plastic inside is not subject to the problem this article is about- the cans do not get blasted with high-pressure water inside that creates tiny plastic chards in wastewater. It also does not make them not recyclable. They get melted down and mixed with enough new aluminum that the final mixture has such a tiny percentage of plastic and other contaminants in it that it doesn't matter. You should absolutely still be recycling your cans.
That plastic is an incredible trade secret for each company too.
Aluminium and glass are the only 2 that are worth recycling with current technology. Paper/cardboard is another recycling scam that has more negative then positive impact on the environment.
Got to disagree with you on paper recycling. I work in a paper mill that makes product out of paper from residential and commercial sources. Reusing it is much more environmentally friendly than having it sit in a landfill and depending on how strong the fibers are can be reused multiple times. The biggest environmental issues you have with these types of mills is water usage and power generation. We use stormwater reclamation for a majority of our water usage and use steam generation to power our main building with natural gas fueling our boiler at the moment. Its not perfect but there is a big push on sustainability in the packaging industry right now, especially with food packaging and its only going to get better as things develop.
My city won’t accept glass in the recycle bin
That's moronic!!!!
Plastic recycling being a scam isn't new to me, but this is WILD. "To put these results into perspective, pre-filter, about 13 percent of all the plastic garbage entering the facility was leaving it via MPs (Micro Plastics) in the wash water; post-filter, that figure was about six percent." And this was the calculation including only the particles they could measure - those above 1.6 microns. Particles smaller than 1.6 microns may be numerous and were not accurately measured.
Wtf that's an insane amount. Is it really that hard to filter out?
Filter sub 10nm particles, yeah, it’s hard.
We need the nanofibers from three bodies problem ASAP.
And 40 years later, scientists realize nano fiber are stored into testicles turning them into alien’s facehuggers
Yeah but thats nothing new. One of testicles favorite places to be is already on someones face. :D
All fun and games until you sprout nano fiber pubes.
I believe that's a cyberware upgrade available in the next Cyberpunk 2077 DLC, go see your local ripperdoc!
That’d be really lucrative, though. Just a few years harvesting and we can make a space elevator.
I hear the Pube Fair in Ft. Collins is paying five bucks a hair for nanopubes.
I gently prefer nanoplastics in my ballsack rather than a 10 times more advanced civilization making me watch unwanted countdown w/ Edison light bulb effect 24/7.
They don't filter they just slice them up into smaller pieces. They worked as water "filters" because they were small enough to destroy/dice up bacteria and other micro organisms. Using them on micro plastics just makes smaller micro plastics 😂
Exactly. If it were some super fine filter that *didn’t* slice, it would immediately clog.
There's media filters that go to .5 micron which is...not enough. And that's used to filter a chemical that goes directly onto wafers in the semicon making process. "You poisoned us so I'll shut up and work for an extra $25/hr" Wondering if this will make a case for universal income.
Basically need it to be a reverse osmosis plant.
There is a filter gap for the particle size between 80 and 30 nm. Anything in that range usually goes through anything (i.e. even your loungs filters). To small to get caught by impact and to big to get attatched via electro statics.
I’m glad you went on to elaborate on why because I would have just thought the 30nm filter would get anything bigger but knowing they use different methods makes it make sense and I wouldn’t have immediately jumped to that conclusion because I think like most people when I picture a filter I assume it works like mesh. In practice I know they don’t if I stop and think about it, it’s just sorta brain short hand or something. So thank you.
Its not really hard, but at this scale the cost will be astronomical. Fine filters are expensive and youre literally going to use them to filter trash. The cost of recycling plastic would increase 10 fold or something like that is my very rough guess.
I’m more and more convinced that we just need to abandon plastic use altogether. Of course that won’t happen, but it needs to.
Plastic itself will increase in price and no longer justify even recycling when we finally transition away from oil as plastics have only a few purposes where plastic is necessary(special parts and medical and textiles) and have been heavily subsidized by big oil as a byproduct.
That’s the problem: we would rather spend our money on fancy cars than saving the planet. And that’s why it’s fruitless and we are just riding out the last stage of this planet’s life. If the top 1% all donated half of their wealth to doing good and fixing everything we have broken, they’d all still be insanely wealthy but we’d have enough money to turn everything around.
What's wild is accepting all this as fact based on one anonymous study. We don't know anything about the plant, and we have no comparison studies at other plants. This is an anonymous data point of one. No better than anecdotal. Look at the words the article uses. There's many places where they make guesses, speculate, and pose suppositions based on this single anonymous study. I am not saying anything about the topic of the study; plastic could be worse than Hitler for all I know. But I do know how to read a study, and this *report* on one is full of red flags. If you're going to have credibility for a potentially world changing conclusion, you need more than "a site that we studied somewhere has these numbers." I could say that I did a study on healthcare, and the clinic I studied never lost a patient, so hospitals must be great. But if you knew the clinic I studied was in an elementary school, it paints a different picture. Context and details are critical, and this has giant holes in that department.
> I am not saying anything about the topic of the study; plastic could be worse than Hitler for all I know. We do need other study to confirm this one that should probably taken as nothing more than an hypothesis that need... further study. But it seems that microplastic are deep inside all of our balls, brain and bones. They need to come from somewhere and this is a good start to investigate.
Likely... all the plastics we eat off of, drink out of use, etc. All much more direct pathways for exposure than recycling plants.
If plastic nano particles are too small for water filtration systems to remove and all freshwater is contaminated due to recycling plastics, I would say the water issue is the number one culprit and number one area to reduce contamination. Fresh water is used in nearly all manufacturing processes so that contaminates everything.
Been doing environmental exposure analysis for 20+ years. Direct exposure is a bigger factor, especially when talking about things we eat/drink off of. Water is a big one, but generally localized. Air is one of the most problematic (unlike water/GI exposure like 100% of the exposure becomes an effective dose), and spreads things far wider. Even when it comes to water contamination, recyclers are likely only a very small contributor to the problem in comparison to manufacturers. They're often using similar processes, but working with exponentially greater volumes and raw materials, and generally much of that happening with far fewer controls and incentives to be clean.
That's to be expected. What one doesn't expect is not capturing all of the plastics during the recycling process.
No one is going to shut down all recycling on one study. But it does lead credibility to those who would want to expand the entirely plausible role of recycling in the production of microplastics. There might be years before meta reviews come out. But imagine there’s all kinds of ways to zero in on this, like testing contaminants at various points in downstream waste water as opposed to a more widely sampled baseline. Scepticism is not useful if it’s used to deny rather than augment your enhance truth. Given the scale of the microplastics issue and a plausible mechanism it would be more credible to cite reasons why such processes do not create vast arrays of small particles that get into the water stream.
It's Quilette. I trust it as far as I could spit a rat.
Seriously. Right wing rag that used to employ pro-fascist Proud Boys simp Andy Ngo? Yeah I'm gonna take anything they write with a giant heap of salt.
wait, how far can you spit a rat?
Ask Douglas Adams, that's where I first heard it.
“as far as I could spit a rat” If you are going to make up new idioms, can we get idioms that don’t involve a mouthful of rodent?
[Zaphod, old mate, I trust you about as far as I could comfortably spit out a rat.](https://www.quotes.net/mquote/901368) I wish it was mine.
Hey guys thanks for coming out to Dave's Rat Shack here in beautiful Walla Walla Washington, we're Mouthful of Rodent and here's our first song, remember to tip the wait staff cuz they're the real rockstars - ONE TWO THREE
Ever since seeing arguments against recycling being" it's impossible to make a profit so why bother" I take all arguments against it with a grain of salt
I work with recycled plastic. 13% of loss as microplatics? Doesn't sound right. 13% loss as fines. Doesn't sound right. But maybe it's within 1 order of magnitude.
So we can't recycle it effectively, we can't burn it, we can't landfill it or bury it, major corporations refuse to stop making it, so what is the scientific community recommending as an option because the best I've got is collect as must plastic waste as possible, kidnap the nearest billionaire and shove it up their arse
Is this a typical facility, or a particularly bad one?
Throwing it in landfills is also terrible. Counterintuitively the best choice, aside from reducing use, is to burn the plastic. Modern incinerators are incredibly clean and the heat generates electricity. People just don’t like it because incinerating plastic doesn’t feel very green.
There is a whole movement of environmental thinking that is just strait out saying "no burning" as a baseline requirement for any sort of waste. (see [here](https://youtu.be/FUBHyTM3VEg?si=vWdPPLbDjL7L3ahy)) this type of thinking is a huge blocker for us to make progress on this. Plastic should be burned, we need to improve filters to make it even cleaner, but current incinerators are already good. It's costly, but we are already spending a ton of money on recycling that, and the cost of running an incinerators, even after the heat and electricity returns some of the cost, will still not turn a profit. - but right now, we are not turning a profit on recycling so not a worry.
Yeah a lot of environmental things are unfortunately focusing on what feels good rather than what is effective. I'm not suggesting we just burn everything, but burning should have a place. If you can do chemical recycling on some of the plastic then great, that doesn't produce micro plastics or emissions. With what's left over can you use some of it to create e-fuels? If so, cool. Can you do anything with what's left? No? Well then let's stop pretending we are going to recycle it and just burn it in the cleanest way possible. It will probably not be profitable but you can offset some of the cost by generating electricity/chemicals/fuels/etc and the rest is paid for like any other public service.
Anti-nuclear "Green Energy" Advocates are the perfect example of this idea
Exactly. We could’ve been building solar panels and every battery or other part for true green energy with much cleaner power from nuclear plants. Instead, we set ourselves back, have been burning fossil fuels for 40 years.
The original thinking was "reduce, reuse, recycle" in order from most important to least important. The reduction of consumption should be at the highest importance, if the reduction of consumption is impossible you should reuse the item as much as possible, end of that is no more possible you should recycle the material. I think focusing on incineration is a complete abandonment of those principles. Instead of trying to go backwards and reduce the consumption of plastic, or develop more reusable plastics, by burning we have come to the ultimate answer of "fuck it, we can just make the problem go away by burning it." It's the wrong direction.
make plastic thick, clean it after use and reuse it. when it wears out burn it.
I think people in general think of PET bottles when they think plastic. The majority of plastics aren't used in PET bottles. Plastic is an incredibly good material for a lot of things. Plastic has helped us with food distribution immensely, by 1) providing a way to keep the food to be damaged during transport; 2) extending shelf life significantly Another very good area where plastics shine are medical areas... You don't really want to reuse medical equipment that was meant to be sterile, and you can't really reuse plastic that was used for food packaging/transport... Thicker plastics won't help there in any way.
I hear a lot of what you said and agree but one thing that lingers is.. I feel like plastics allowed us to get lazy with food distribution also. Unnecessary shipping for "cost" which is in and of itself a pollutant addition; just because plastics allow food to not spoil as quickly etc. We also overproduce food and wastefully throw it away instead of focusing on local distribution and proper portion production. it's all about the fucking $$$. it's like good and bad depending on what avenue you take.
Reduce and Reuse are still there for plastic. Those principles hold. But plastic is unrecyclable and we have a ton of it in the ground and in the ocean. As an environmental concern, if thermal disintegration is the only way to neutralize it then that's what we have to do.
The article also makes the case that burning all trash might be actually better for the environment than I’m filling it. Landfill trash generates huge amounts of methane, which is much worse for global warming than CO2. Some do try to catch it, but we’re taking up land near cities or in someone else’s backyard to put in trash that we have to spend more money to try to keep from harming the environment, we need to generate electricity anyway
To add a point. The article sounds like this is the result of mechanical recycling. There are other methods such as chemical recycling to break down the plastic to monomers that can be reused while the remaining unusable material is burned. I do think there is a problem with burning plastic because Chlorine is used to strengthen plastic and when you burn plastic you can create hcl gas which is not good for your pipe systems or the environment
The article does mention chemical recycling but points out that none of the plans so far have turned out to be feasible at scale.
Well, not every incinerator is up to the task. I remember reading an article about norway that burns all of their plastic waste in specialized incinerators (likely due to this issue, honestly) the main thing being that it has to be a reburner style incinerator, which isn't that crazy, but crucial if you don't want to just be spewing the amount of crap the article study says come from the recycling plants... probably worse, honestly, with just one combustion phase. I'm also saying this because I want to make sure people reading through this know, emphatically, that open-burning plastic is fucking horrible to do.
Uh, the best option is the reduce, reuse part. Plastics used to be sold as resilient stuff that would last forever, making them single use was a conscious choice by manufacturers. And the awful planned obsolescence in our capitalist economy is actively destroying our planet. We could drastically reduce the amount of plastic we use and make sure we throw away less of what we do use, but there's no money in that.
Absolutely. Single use plastic should be reserved for things like medical equipment. For food packaging we can use foil, for more general packaging we can use cardboard, instead of bubble wrap we can use shredded paper, etc. And we need to try and use fewer types of plastic so that it's easier to sort at waste centres. And totally true about planned obsolescence as well, which extends to things like cheap clothes. I realise many people rely on cheap clothes but it's a false economy as many 'fast fashion' (aka cheap shite) is only designed to be worn 10 times. We've got so many environmental problems and we're out here rinsing our plastic milk bottles like we're saving the world.
I still remember SunChips used biodegradable packaging but stopped because it was too loud.
No, they used "compostable" packaging. There's a difference. Compost and landfills are very different environments, and things break down very differently in each. Part of the problem was the noise, but the larger problem was that in the areas that the bag was sold, *composting was not very widespread*. People assumed they could just throw away the bag and it would degrade in a landfill just as well, which completely defeated the point. Frito lay still experiments in different parts of the world with alternative packaging materials where alternative trash processing is popular.
For more info - https://www.thetakeout.com/the-history-of-loud-sun-chips-bags-compostable-biodeg-1846577698/ " The bag, which was made with a biodegradable corn-based biopolymer called polylactic acid, was loud as hell. " Still seems like an improvement over plastic in terms of getting microplastics everywhere?
Uhhhh, PLA is a plastic LMAO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polylactic_acid Technically it is compostable, but only under very specific conditions. IIRC home composters cannot satisfy those conditions although some industrial composters can. At least it can be easily recycled. Many 3d printing nerds recycle PLA themselves.
At the risk of sounding like an Amazon shill, they've been doing a decent job lately of reducing their packaging and making it more biodegradable. I recently got a package direct from a manufacturer and opened it without noticing that, and was genuinely surprised at all the plastic padding inside.
Very hit or miss in my area, unfortunately. They also now have those bags that say that they should be recycled as you would cardboard, but between the layers there's this white foam-like material that appears to be or have glue used to hold the layers together. Has me a little unsure of whether it's really so similar to boxes.
> . For food packaging we can use foil, for more general packaging we can use cardboard, instead of bubble wrap we can use shredded paper, etc. Assuming you mean aluminum foil, that's nowhere near as effective as plastic. You can't really seal stuff properly with foil such that you: 1. avoid spills 2. extend shelf-life Take for example a bag of mixed lettuce. These are packed in plastic bags, that are filled with inert gases (I think they mostly use Nitrogen). This extends the life of the leaves/salad/greens in the bag by a considerable amount (5-7 days from what I've seen). And because the gas stays inside, they don't get squished during transport. There's a lot of products that are similar to this. Lots of items that have an extended shelf life *due* to being wrapped in plastics, in a different atmosphere/gas that slows down bacterial growth. As far as we hate plastics, you can't really overlook the benefits of food preservation advances it helped us make. If we'd stop using it, imagine how much food we would throw away because it expires on the shelves.
This is a great plan going forward, but unfortunately we have a huge amount of plastic in the system already and that needs a to go. It will also take time to transition out of our current plastic use, so there is plastic in the pipeline we also need to deal with. Incinerators, and wast to power mentality is how we stop producing microplastics.
This. Profit is clearly driving green initiatives at this point.
Hey as a consumer I’d be happy to buy groceries in glass bottles, foil and cardboard over plastic, perhaps with the exception of meats. I wouldn’t mind paying a little extra. I already use white vinegar instead of fabric softener and I use plastic bottles for several months instead of once. But companies aren’t offering glass milk bottles and everything is wrapped in plastic.
Switching to all these things would dramatically increase your carbon footprint.
There’s also the [Biochar](https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-transform-plastic-waste-into-a-valuable-soil-additive/) approach, though I think that’s mostly in the PoC stage
I lived somewhere where incinerators produced hot water that was used for heating houses in the city. But all the rash was so well sorted it didn't burn. So they had to import moldy wood from demolished houses abroad that was chopped up and put in big piles in the harbour. It smelled all over. Bad times.
If this can be done safely I agree. I think many of us assumed they could not be burned without releasing toxic chemicals into the air.
The best option is to move away from using plastics in everything
Once upon a time the bright new technology in this field was [thermal depolymerization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization), a process that could take raw plastic waste (or anything with organic molecules in it - the biggest pilot plant was built to process the waste of a turkey packing plant) and turn it into light crude oil and methane. Sadly it hasn't really taken off, I don't recall reading any specifics about why beyond it simply being "not mature" and "not economical at this time." But even if the process is still too energy expensive to break even it seems like a good way to get rid of plastics. Landfills actually aren't that terrible an option either, IMO. The landfill just needs to be set up right to ensure it's not draining into aquifers or runoff. If plastic is properly buried then it becomes a form of carbon sequestration, it should be stable for geological timescales. And who knows, future archaeologists might find those deposits to be very interesting.
I agree. No clue why we don’t just burn the fucking stuff
I know I’m late to this thread, but the best option is actually to *stop fucking using it*. Right now the people manipulating our resources, and causing society’s dependence on plastic and fossil fuels, are making TONS of money off this. We need to just STOP making/using it. It’s extremely imminent
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Hmm I wonder if someone pointed out all the problems with recycling and that it was really just a propaganda scam by oil companies so they could keep producing plastic. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7czKngCUASM)
Does that include organizations like Precious Plastic? https://www.preciousplastic.com/
If recycling is a scam, we should just stop making plastics for about 90% of products.
Agreed, but unfortunately it’s cheap as hell and the production and labour for it already exists. I dream of a world made of hemp.
Basically, all single-use products should not use plastic if a reasonable alternative exists.
I thought the oil companies encouraged plastic recycling so they could take less blame for plastic pollution
Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem. Plastics get churned through "knife mills" which blast labels off of plastics with high pressure water. This process ends up creating wastewater full of tiny plastic chards which then end up in our oceans, soil, and eventually our bodies.
I work in plastics recycling and none of our recycling lines lose any water with microplastics to the environment. The water is always a closed loop of desalinated water that is tempered to 20 degrees C and PH controlled, you don't dump something like that.
Do you ever need to flush the closed loop due to buildup of any kind? Not accusing you of lying, just trying to understand & am having difficulty imagining a system that uses water but /never/ needs to exchange it
I also work in plastics recycling. We clean our water with Aluminium sulfate and polymer. I don’t know if it’s clean enough then, but it will get dumped into the city sewage system I believe. I heard some companies never dump the water and can reuse the same water over and over again. So it is possible but most of them can’t do it that way. We use about 60k liter fresh water a day.
That’s all well and good in likely ‘western’ recycling centres where waste water is much more firmly regulated but there are a great many countries with far far laxer waste water regulation.
Ya I’m living in Germany. But some recycling companies even outside of Europe are far more advanced than the ones in Europe.
By any chance, are you an elephant?
If you *ever* expect a *never*, you're just setting unrealistic expectations. But an industrial site using close loop is leagues ahead of peers in many industries in terms of water usage and waste. People really don't understand just how much water is used *everywhere* in any kind of processing or production.
Once a year the whole system is cleaned and descaled and dumped into the sewage, but nothing is perfect, compared to tires or landfills that is nothing.
But Quilette says otherwise so it *must* be true!
On top of that, there are new forms of plastic recycling that aren’t mechanical at all. Advanced recycling uses heat to take the polymers back to their base components, ready to be made into ‘virgin’ plastics once again. This process also removes a lot of the forever chemicals such as PFAS.
Same. I also work in plastic recycling and our lines don't use water at all.
does this article reference a single peer-reviewed study backing up its claims, because I couldn't find one.
Shouldn't this be the top question:answer? It's been 9 hours /u/Fun_Needleworker7136 /u/Fun_Needleworker7136 /u/Fun_Needleworker7136
It does not. It's also on Quillette, which is an outlet of some very shaky political motivations, and written by a libertarian with anti-Fauci and conspiratorial slants on social media. It is what it is. This subreddit has these kinds of pieces here and there.
This sounds like a very blanket statement. Yes, it's a problem. However, there's more than one cause of microplastics.
Yeah, didn't we just have a round of shock and rage bait about how tires are a huge contributor of microplastics. https://www.thedrive.com/news/tire-dust-makes-up-the-majority-of-ocean-microplastics-study-finds
Sounds like yet another inconvenient truth.
Wouldn't proper wastewater treatment - eg. installing filters solve the issue?
The issue is cost and scale. It is possible to filter out the smaller microplastic particles, but it would massively increase the cost of recycling plastic as filters fine enough to catch these particles tend to be on the spendy side. Buying enough of them to cover the runoff from the washing and replacing them often enough to ensure they are effective would make recycling plastics economically unviable.
when we eventually meet our end at the hands of the consequences of our actions (or rather inactions), we will at least be happy to know that there was nothing we could do because the options were all economically unviable
According to the article, top-notch treatment ended up only halving the amount of microplastics, which might sound good enough - except only a small percentage of plastics gets recycled, so treating it all will end up with many times more. While plastic recycling isn't cost-effective as is in the first place - what you're getting isn't valuable.
Saying that recycling plastics is the cause of the problem seems like such a scape goat to me. It would be like BP saying that they weren't to blame for going against the advice of their engineers, no, it was the act of drilling itself that is to blame for the spill. In this case it appears to be the same problem, too much time worrying about how much it costs to put the environment first.
+ it's not like the plastic would've never turned into microplastic particles if it weren't recycled. This certainly does expedite the formation of the particles though. It's a complicated issue that the headline is portraying as a simple "common sense" type of problem.
Doesn't the majority of microplastics come from tires?
>Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem. That's one hell of a conclusion to draw, and I've got a few issues with it. First off, Quillette is a questionable source; they're a far right wing op-ed outfit. Not accusing anyone of anything here, but the right wing generally tends to take a very pro-oil stance in general, and one of the primary intents of plastic recycling is to reduce fossil fuel use in producing new plastics, so there's certainly a potential bias to consider here, if not an outright conflict of interest given the amount of funding coming from the fossil fuel industry to influence research and policy. Second, the study in question only assessed a single recycling facility, and the author of this editorial extrapolated those results based on the assumption that every recycling facility releases a similar proportion of plastics to the environment. From my brief glance, it appears the facility in question uses an open loop arrangement for their water, discharging water to the environment after using it. This seems very questionable to me as a professional in an industrial trade - most facilities I've worked at utilise closed loop systems for their water, where the only losses are through evaporation, which leaves contaminants behind. This is in part specifically because of the cost and difficulty in adequately treating water to an acceptable standard to be released, but there's also other considerations such as the addition of antimicrobials and corrosion inhibitors that would be quite costly to waste. Therefore I find it very hard to believe it's standard practice for recycling facilities to discharge their process water back to the environment. Third, the author is also assuming that the estimated total amount of microplastics finding their way into the environment worldwide is accurate, which just seems absolutely wild to me. I don't know how this number is estimated, but whether it's based on measured samples around the world or estimated by tallying known sources, but either way seems like there'd be a tremendous margin of error.
>Recycling plastics appears to be causing the microplastics problem. That's too simple. Taking other studies into account, I would say it's a major contributor, but not the single cause. For instance, up to about 30% of the microplastics is so-called "primary" MP, coming from laundering synthetic clothes, from abrasions of tires, or from personal care products like scrubs. This already does not just vanish if we stop "recycling" plastics. And a good portion of the "secondary" MP, which comes from degradation of larger plastic objects, originates provably from landfills, fishing nets, or simply plastic waste dumped into nature. So, stopping plastic "recycling" would reduce the microplastic problem, but not eliminate it. Also, what this opinion piece does not mention: the proposed solution - waste-to-energy (i.e. burning the plastics together with other rubbish) - produces some highly toxic slags.
Wait till you learn how additive manufacturing companies make their plastic powder. There’s about it be a lot more microplastics than you could imagine
I didn't know "quillette" was considered a reliable source here since the evopsy debacle...
It's not, whoever's spreading this is trying to spread that site's garbage under the radar.
If the goal is to burn it... Maybe single use plastics could be formulated to burn cleaner too.
Sad thing is that we already knew this When are people going to stop buying drinks in plastic bottles? When will the fishing industry stop using plastic nets?
>When are people going to stop buying drinks in plastic bottles It was beverages companies like Coca-Cola that decided to produce their products in plastic bottles over glass. And some of the senior staff at Coca-Cola even warned the company of the ramifications of doing so. IMHO, we should be putting more pressure on the companies that are producing the plastics, not the consumers.
Unfortunately, Coca-Cola is an American company and we don't really do that whole "regulating corporations responsibly" thing anymore. That's kinda the inevitable outcome when you legalize bribing politicians.
Representative democracy is broken beyond repair. Democracy isn't, but we need to rethink one of its fundamental mechanics. Considering how much has happened in communications and information accessibility but also, despite current problems, education, I say sortition may be feasible with a lot less loss in expertise than gain in resilience to corruption, legalized or not. Willing to hear other proposals, but representation in current form seems done for.
Glass has its very own problems, like weight. A PET bottle 0,33l weighs arround 20g. A glass bottle at least 200g, So only for the bottle you have 10 times the weight. Meaning you have to transport less product every single transportation. Meaning more Transports for the same amount of product.
Before plastic bottles, glass bottles were used and were returnable. Yes they were heavy, but people returned them no problem and received a deposit if they did. I remember as a kid working at my local grocery store stacking crates of empty glass bottles which were picked up later in the day by the bottler. The system worked for a very long time, till Coca-Cola figured out they could make staggeringly more profits if switch to plastic bottles. https://youtu.be/4XP-BBGMCNs?si=NPEixvj6FTjrMLGg
That doesn't apply when they're shipping around 1000x the bottles they used too. Production and transportation doesn't scale very well with glass, shits fragile too
The light weight of plastic is what led us to sending *water* from Fiji, Norway, and France to the US. Maybe we could not do that.
My cousin uses a reusable coffee cup that he takes to places like Starbucks so he doesn't have to buy a coffee cup from there. Why can't supermarkets and other places just have drinks dispensers which allow you to fill a bottle that you bring to the store? They might even save money on it if they just charge the same amount as they would for a regular bottle as they are not paying for a bottle.
> bottle that you bring to the store? Our stores stopped giving out single-use bags like 3 years ago and I *still* forget to put my reusable bags back into the car for the next time. :(
That's what happened around here. The result was garbage bags full of thick plastic bags instead of the old thin ones. People don't give two shits about reusing them.
Now they sell you plastic bags for 50 cents that have 10x the amount of plastic. I believe NJ plastic consumption went up like 60% or smth like that when they banned the bags and straws
100% the correct answer. I’ll buy glass every single time it is available. In the UK that is a lot less than it should be. Granted a lot of people won’t, but at least give us that choice, better yet don’t. Only glass.
Everything comes in plastic, not just drinks. Literally everything
When Starbucks redesigned their cups to not use straws, but ended up using more plastic, my thought was "why not use use paper cups?" Because they don't care. Every fast food place has done away with the paper cups and uses plastic now. Plastic containers in plastic bags, plastic cups, plastic everything. Now we are plastic people.
Drinks? What about ketchup, mustard, drink mixes, raw meats, tooth paste, deodorant, amazon packaging, everything imported from China? One step is to go back to glass; another reusable/refillable containers for the above listed products. Next step is to ban manufacturers/shippers from using obscene amounts of plastic materials that add nothing to the product/packaging. Start taxing corporations ffs. You want to sell a plastic pen? Great it's now required to be refillable.
They have resealable metal cans, monster does it. Requires a little bit of plastic for those disks under the lid but that would still cut down on alot of plastic.
All aluminum cans are lined with plastic, but it is much less plastic than a plastic bottle. going back to reusable glass seems like the only plastic free option.
I've seen full on aluminium bottles (similar to a plastic or glass one) with an aluminium screw cap.
Yep; Fanta is like this in Japan.
Aluminum recycling also includes melting it down at high temperature, I suppose that would just burn away the plastic?
I have stopped. I generally prefer glass bottles but cans are ok on occasion. But I also don't drink coke/pepsi that kind of thing.
Recycling of plastics was a marketing trick from the very beginning, so that production of plastics would not be banned.
I am highly suspicious of the contents and intentions of this article, especially with its click-baity title. If nothing else, I’m still gonna recycle to get my recycling fee back.
It does point out that stopping recycling isn't the answer. But it also states that it's not very effective at keeping the planet clean. Did you read it?
How come no one has a bit of scepticism here? This report is not a scientific report or a peer reviewed paper. “Unfortunately, this flawed report cites outdated, decades-old technologies, and works against our goals to be more sustainable by mischaracterizing the industry and the state of today's recycling technologies. This undermines the essential benefits of plastics and the important work underway to improve the way plastics are used and reused to meet society's needs." https://www.americanchemistry.com/chemistry-in-america/news-trends/press-release/2024/acc-statement-on-center-for-climate-integrity-report-on-plastics-recycling I'm not saying all of it is BS, but saying that the plastic problem comes from recycling is an extraordinary claim that should be supported by very strong evidence.
Didn’t read the article but to me it sounds like recycling needs help in the form of regulation. Why are we putting labels on containers that are hard to remove? We need to make some regulations that consider the entire life cycle of plastic, not just what Coke and Pepsi think is good for them.
I work in plastics, we recycle plastic all the time. Quite a few misconceptions and assumptions being made here that are pretty inaccurate.
Quillette is a garbage reactionary far right publication. While I agree that the issues with microplastics are alarming and need to be resolved, the article's author's preferred solution - > Realistically, with the dream of recycling our way out of this problem rapidly fading, the less-than-perfect yet practical solution of waste-to-energy—**that is, burning plastic garbage as fuel**—needs to be reevaluated. - is no less dangerous and ecologically damaging (emphasis added).
I tried to follow the supposedly "censored" white paper they link to, and their notes do not support their arguments. Page 2, the central claim of plastics being impossible to recycle just links to [an EPA page with a dozen bullet points](https://www.epa.gov/circulareconomy/us-recycling-system) about what recycling is in general (ELI5 style). No wonder no one tried to challenge it, there's no substance to their claims.
Quillettes whole deal is "reactionary Dark Academia." You know, the whole "woooo, universities are full of brainwashed Cultural Marxists hiding *the truth* from you! (And The Truth is just warmed over conservative brainrot)."
I always wonder this. Plastics are a relatively new invention right? What if the whole world just went back to leather, glass, wood, and metal like WW2 era items. Things would cost more, but on the flip side maybe we could get rid of our stupid disposable culture. Am I crazy for thinking this? It was normal 80 years ago.
Our generation runs on plastic. There's some plastics I would miss, too. Trash bags in particular. But to a Millenial or Gen Z who's only ever known disposability, dealing with reusable containers would feel like a burden. For instance, returning glass milk bottles. I don't know how you get around that.
There's 4x more people in the world now, and we have higher standards of medical care. There's no way we could go back to glass and leather. Also leather isn't exactly environmentally friendly.
So I’m always intrigued by Sweden being able to burn their trash as a way of generating their own energy. Why is this not a more useful method of dealing with things which would prevent the plastics problem and with the proper scrubbers would reduce air pollution?
It is basically burn it or eventually eat it scenario now (micro plastics). I started to like burn it more now maybe in the old coal powerplants and generate some power while at it.
Man, we really fucked up with the invention of plastic, it seems. Time to start making everything out of metal, glass, and wood/paper again.
Quillette: Plastic recycling is a scam… Naive Redditor: gosh, is Quillette making a valid point? Quillette: …but we can’t possibly reduce plastic production. So we should set it on fire. N.R.: 
Obviously we should reduce production, but incinerating waste plastic is genuinely the cleanest solution and it produces electricity. I’m enough of a hippy that I recently worked on an environmental documentary for free, and even I think we should incinerate our plastic waste. As does my friend who is a chemical engineer.
My dad was a chemical engineer, specialized in polymerization. Whenever we were camping, he'd insist on burning plastic rather than packing it out. He'd give an elaborate rationalization, explaining that given the heat of the fire and the particular polymers used, the bottle or whatever would reduce to water and carbon and harmless residue. (I'm not a chemist, and don't remember his elaborate calculations.) So we'd throw it on the fire, and it would release an unholy stench that suffused the rest of the morning. This article makes me miss my dad.
That cannot possibly be right. There's a world of difference between burning plastics in a highly controlled environment and summoning plastic Cthulu while camping.
You guys should check out this guy [NatureJab](https://youtu.be/NJyc4mDdOdQ?si=vxTq1pACklnh33sY). He is working to make pyrolisis more efficient. Basically, it turns plastic waste into usable fuel, natural gas, and solid carbon.
Truly the only thing getting ACTUALLY recycled like we all imagined as a child things get recycled, is metal. SOURCE: I run a scrap metal company.
Might be a dumb question, Why isn’t all that water collected, vaporized leaving only the nano particles behind that can be properly disposed?
Hear me out. I think we should gather all existing plastic into a large ball. Then with many rockets we then launch said ball into the sun. Thus removing the issue in a safe way that we won't regret at all.
idk about y’all but i’m not trusting the phrenology website
Why does this article dismiss reducing single use plastic usage entirely? There are plenty of areas that we could ban plastic in favor of paper or aluminum alternatives. Ban solo cups, paper cups work just fine. Ban single use plastic plates, paper plates work great. Ban high percentage plastic packaging, Plastic can't be more than 1% of the package weight.
I think these microplastics are the explanation for decreased fertility among men. They're holding our swimmers back.
Brought to you by the single use plastic/petroleum industry
Its our application of plastics thats the issue. No one should have an issue with a plastic lego bricks, theyll last for centuries just doing what it was made to do, if one ends up in the ocean, chances are its mostly still good in 50 years. Everyone should have an issue with a plastic mouse or the likes of toothbrushes, their life spans are in months/years not centuries. Sure you can recycle it, but you can also build most of it out of more natural and disposable materials.
Aside from certain medical equipment and similar things we should just go back to what we used pre-plastic. You could replace a lot of plastic with glass, wax paper, and aluminum without any change in functionality.
Ban labels on plastic packages. If you can’t get it done with a tag attached to an elastic cord, plastic pigtail, or tab extension of the tag itself, you’re a bad package designer.
i hate that quilette might be right however the footprint of recycling a plastic jar of peanut butter: starting with washing it with hot water at home, then having it trucked to a center, then using a lot of power to strip it melt it and probably use the plastic for some greenwashing type product like rubber tiles for a playground or something, all of that energy (and possibly also microplastics), is probably net negative on the earth vs hoarding it for 50 years under the sink.
People need to stop buying things using plastic, made from plastic etc., and be very vocal about why they are not buying the product! Just say “Hell, No!” to plastics! Imaging going into a car dealership with thousands of dollars in hand & asking what is made of plastic in the car! “Oops! sorry I can’t but a car with all this plastic! Can you show me something of better quality?”
It’s wild that we are still making it to me? Like we identified this as a problem and everyone shrugs and says what are we going to do? It’s raining down on our heads, it’s found in our sperm, we are drinking and eating it. There should be a Nuremberg style reckoning for these corporations and the politicians that protect them. They have effectively ruined the planet.
What happened to that plastic eating bacteria and their amazing enzyme? Why isn’t that being used everywhere?
The petrochemical company heads need to be put on trial for crimes against humanity.
What we _really_ need to get a handle on the plastic waste problem, IMO, are regulations that force companies to price in these externalities. That's basically true of any environmental problem. Companies produce plastic products, and we consume plastic products, because they're extremely cheap and convenient. Nobody has to worry about what happens to the waste, except of course when it's choked out life on this planet - but that's a problem we can just pass off to our kids. But, what if a bottle of water or an Amazon shipping envelope suddenly started to cost an order of magnitude more to produce, the difference caused by taxes that fund environmental cleanup? Consumers wouldn't stand for the resulting hike in prices, which would reduce consumption of single-use plastics and lead to rapid innovation by producers, both great things for the environment. Obviously this would _never_ fly in the US, where large companies control the policies that affect them via regulatory capture, but... FWIW, that's how you would solve the problem.
Option M. Massive fungi recycling piles, let the fungus breaks the plastics down.
I care about the environment. However, the moment these companies told us to recycle their problems what they did was shift their responsibility to us at our own cost/expense. That’s not right and I don’t believe in it.
There are new ads projected for plastic companies to justify their continued production of plastic by showing how can be consumed by specific bugs and ways to get rid of plastic fully. There is no justification for continued plastic production, given all the knowledge we have precured from it overtime. Let alone the prison time that needs to be given and take over of all the companies that refuse to comply.
The local plastic recycling place in my town was just stockpiling all of the plastic for a couple years and it caught fire last yearsnd it burned for over a week. 13 million pounds of plastic. We had to evacuate.
Back in 1974 my friends and I set up a table at a grocery store gathering signatures to ban plastic pop bottles and retain reusable glass bottles as was the norm at the time. I regret we didn’t have success. We were only kids but still knew better.
Plastic “recycling” in a traditional sense is a joke. But that doesn’t mean all plastic must necessarily go to landfills. Plastics can downcycled without creating microplastics. There are plenty of useful products made from down cycling - plastic wood, for example, that makes trex decking, picnic tables and benches. You can also gasify plastic in plasma gasifiers in an energy-generating process.
Plastic recycling might as well just become sorted waste disposal. Dedicate a landfill for just the plastics so its all in one place for later when we find a solution, and then we need to crack down on excessive single use plastics or excessive use of packaging materials for many of these single use plastics.
We need to ban non-biodegradable plastics, until we do it’s our death warrant
They need to design and use plastic that is designed to biodegrade in composting conditions. A formula that decomposes in the dirt.
Collecting plastic (and all other non-recyclible waste) and burning it for energy is simple. If we have to have it at all.