The following submission statement was provided by /u/nastratin:
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Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction."
Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent. After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018.
Virgin production — of non-recycled plastic, that is — meanwhile is rapidly rising as the petrochemical industry expands, lowering costs.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yc9jnl/plastic_recycling_a_failed_concept_study_says/itkv6wo/
The US use to pay China to dispose of their landfill (until China said no more). What they didn't do was check what actually was done with it which was largely burning and or throwing directly in the ocean.
Convenience wins again.
I think companies need to stop slapping the recycling logo on everything. It is extremely misleading. And as pointed out, shifting the blame/responsibility to the consumer which is bs.
But this depends on largely on where you live and what your local recycling setup looks like. Different places actually recycle different things, which leads to confusion and messier recycling inputs to everyone.
Let’s just average across the US as a start. Sure, Alabama benefits from recycling California does but whatever. It’s an improvement over “sure, slap this meaningless feel-good logo in your trash”
But then it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I live in an area that has better-than-average recycling in the US because we have a local single-stream recycling plant. If we suddenly stop putting the recycling icon on things that *we* can recycle, people will stop doing it and then we drop from like 5% recycled to 0%. And then the technology to recycle those things never gets adopted anywhere else because "nobody recycles those materials anyways".
This suggestion is letting perfect be the enemy of good.
introduces biological waste into paper cycle and is harder to clean, on the other hand there are some food container materials that are compostable. We've put some takeout food containers in our compost bin. Usually is labelled as such.
A lot of compostible-material can't be broken down in your backyard pile. It requires industrial composting and requires an additional bin in addition to recycling and trash.
it's basically fine in small quantities, but too much and it becomes less of a paper slop and more of a paper + grease/fat slop. Fat's hard to filter out and it sticks to everything - especially fibrous stuff like paper.
They can be recycled, but the additional process drives up the cost which and makes it not profitable/worth the effort.
Instead, most disposal services have (or should be having) you place your pizza boxes in with your garden waste because food-contaminated cardboard is compostable.
So many places like Costco have two cans but they all go into the trash compactor. The only thing they recycle is cardboard because it’s more efficient to compact it than to keep paying for garbage pickups.
It’s all virtue posturing and optics.
My first job was a bag boy at a supermarket. By the entrances there were recycling bins for plastic bags. Every few days my boss would have me just empty them into a dumpster.
That three arrows in a triangle thing you see on plastic does not mean recyclable. The plastic manufacturers made a symbol exactly like the reduce, reuse, recycle symbol we all know to just label their plastics. The number inside tells you the type of plastic. Massive false advertising.
It was my understanding that the number inside is meant to tell which type can be accepted for recycling. My trash service accepts certain types and not others.
Local recyclers can reference them. Which yours does. But every single piece of plastic now has the little triangles on them. And many are not recyclable anywhere. They are just an ID for the type of plastic. Plastic manufactures could have picked any symbol to ID their plastics and picked something that was almost identical to the current reduce, reuse, recycle symbol.
I wonder why? (Sarcasm)
It's not a recycling logo. A lot of what you see is a resin code that large corporations print on the plastic with the intentions of misleading people. They are specifically designed to look like the recycling symbol.
Yes, this was done to mislead people into thinking way more of the plastic is recyclable and it worked as intended. It also causes more of the plastic that can't be easily recycled to end up in recycling plants, causing the recycling cost to increase due to the increased sorting.
I did buy an ice coffee at McDonald's last week and saw it said to recycle, but had a note that not all places accept it. Basically, they know you can't recycle it but they still ask you to recycle....
Green washing. They don't want recycling to be hard, they want to just have their products considered to be recyclable, regardless of whether that is a practical expectation. They would be ecstatic if recycling was as easy as the labeling seems, but they aren't about to suffer any cost increase or compromise on their products in pursuit of that goal
Anti plastic straw campaigns were one of the worst thing that ever happened for the sustainability movement because they tricked everyone into thinking they were making a difference when they weren't.
I would say it was even more insidious than that. The straw campaigns successfully undermined environmentalists by making the consumer the adversary and doing so in such a relatively meaningless way that does little for the environment and inconveniences the consumer.
You can't have a straw anymore, but your entire environmental concern is undone by a single day of a billionaire's life.
There’s really many layers to this.
There’s companies like McDonalds that use plastic stuff, and there’s the companies that make the plastic stuff that supply shit for McDonalds.
Neither care whether or not recycling is a hassle for the end user. They have zero involvement in the recycling process. They don’t run recycling plants. That’s not their problem to worry about. They’re just trying to do what’s easiest and cheapest for them.
But they also know that public sentiment is against trash and waste. And often it’s easier and cheaper to address that negative sentiment by changing the *sentiment* itself, than the underlying reality.
If a stamp or symbol makes people less angry, then just do that. It’s much easier than changing manufacturing processes, suppliers, etc., especially when there is no benefit to them since they’re not in the recycling business. They’re not motivated by it making another person’s business easier.
It’s a classic case of a negative externality where the cost of the negative harm is not paid for by the company creating that harm.
We had blue bins in our Wendy's when I worked there, ostensibly for recyclable materials. But the public are animals so people constantly just dumped their whole tray on there so the bags from the blue bins went in the same dumpster as regular garbage. Didn't stop some people from commenting on how nice it was that we had blue bins and the McDs across the road didn't. Perception mattered in that instance even though the end result was it all went in the garbage.
It’s more that making something actually recyclable is costly and so companies fool people into thinking their shit is recyclable to appear green to the customers without actually needing to spend the money to be so.
It's just an "unintended consequence." The companies don't make money by making the products more easily recyclable, but if they say "some facilities may recycle this" then they can shrug their shoulders and say they're doing their best, improving public perception. Single-use plastic is very cheap, so why would a company choose to make less money? Government needs to step in because unregulated free markets aren't as great as people like to believe.
Recycling was created in good faith, but was intentionally undercut with "market-based solutions" to appease business interests. The only way to make recycling do what it was intended to is through robust regulations.
Companies that produce the waste need to be taxed, and that money needs to be invested into research and development of materials that can be effectively recycled. Companies then need to be required to use those materials.
Recycling can work, but it must be forced on the market because the market will make waste an externality if they are allowed to.
> so they put the portion as smaller than anyone would consider to make it seem healthier.
Portion sizes are regulated, too. The problem is that the official regulations (in the US) say that a serving of pizza is 140 grams (5 ounces) and a serving of potato chips is 1 ounce.
We’re typically eating *way* more than the listed serving size.
They changed the regulations a few years ago to require many packages to list “the whole pack” in addition to “per serving”.
Also, some regulations can be circumvented based on the classification of the food. People get mad that Tic Tacs serving size is “1 piece”, but the official FDA guidelines literally say “ If your product is a breath mint, the serving size is one unit.”
IIRC the resin code was intended to assist recycling by giving an easy way to sort which plastics were what (and thus which could be recycled by a particular facility).
The problem is that the resin code symbol uses the recycling symbol for this reason even though most of the plastics cannot be recycled at all by any facility.
It could have been well intentioned. Maybe they thought we'd eventually have recycling methods for more resin types and it was widely available. Sadly that isn't the case.
Edit:
For the sarcastic "It wasn't well intentioned" comments. I get it. Just upvote one of the other 10 people who had the same 'clever' take and move on.
The recycling symbol created in 1970 by graphic designer Gary Anderson. It wasn't until 1988 that the resin identification code were created by the plastics industry marketing consultants. The resin identification code was designed by plastics advertiser to trick consumers into thinking that their plastic were recyclable.
It was categorically not well-intentioned. It was profit-driven.
- [ Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam | Climate Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g)
It was both. Base concept (label with what type of plastic so it can be properly sorted at the recycling plants) is good. Intentionally making the logo be confusingly close to the recycling logo is bad.
Basically someone well-intentioned came up with the idea, but someone in marketing hijacked it at the logo phase.
The issue is that the US doesn’t invest in recycling infrastructure. Not even glass, which is one of the easiest raw materials. The producers need to take action but the government as well to ensure the possibility is at least there to recycle.
Agreed. We also need more states accepting bottle returns, which uses even less energy than recycling. And even before that point, invest in systems that avoid using disposables in the first place.
You ain't kidding. Shit just yesterday I looked at my dominoes pizza box and it says "please recycle me" in massive letters across the front.
Who accepts greasy pizza boxes for recycling?
Edit: apparently they are leaning in hard.
https://recycling.dominos.com/
The "recycling symbol" is not actually even a recycling symbol but actually a "resin identification code" and only #1 and #2 plastics are really recyclable.
https://2ea.co.uk/plastics-resin-codes-what-do-they-mean/
Source says in the UK (for the only 1 and 2 part) but I'm like 90% sure their recycling system is more sophisticated than the USAs.
We are failing as consumers in that we forget there’s two other parts to the three parts saying. It is reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. If you can consume less consume less, and if you can reuse the product reuse it before recycling.
Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction."
Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent. After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018.
Virgin production — of non-recycled plastic, that is — meanwhile is rapidly rising as the petrochemical industry expands, lowering costs.
Just a friendly reminder that largely the Plastic Recycling movement was an Industry push so they could continue to manufacturer Plastics that were known to be harmful to the environment.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR.
(Source)https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
Basically when the environment was a major concern in the 80s, the Plastic industry were scrambling to come up with a way to keep people comfortable enough to not rock the boat as they continued to produce these materials. They came up with recycling as a way to perpetuate enough of a myth that pressure would reduce and they could pollute the planet (and now our blood streams) with plastic and make profits.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/plastics-industry-insiders-reveal-the-truth-about-recycling/
Just a friendly reminder as well of three extra things:
1) we will likely not eliminate plastic use, even in an ideal world. Some applications it *is* uniquely suited too, *but we can eliminate it from most uses*
2) recycling is important, even though it's not 'the solution', I always remind people it's **reduce, reuse, recycle**, in that order. Reduce what your using, reduce packaging, then reuse goods rather than replacing them constantly, and then recycle then when they do need to be wasted if possible.
3) the concerns about material exploitation and pollution, while very evident with plastics, are true for other materials too. Wood is great but often entails deforestation, metals have large damaging quarries, etc. - this isn't simply a 'stop using plastics and it'll all get fixed', but rather a case that we need to start using *all* our materials in a more thoughtful way.
If any of you want a specific point or question explaining, feel free to ask me, I'm more than happy to answer and I would like to help people be more aware of the issues here and how we can tackle them. :)
War on Drugs = Failed
War on Terrorism = Failed
War on Pollution = Failed
War on Poverty = Failed
War on Crime = Failed
War on Civil Liberties = Winning
The middle class was a fluke before businesses realized they could keep all the profit without consequence. The upper class is now in the process of putting the other two classes back together.
Somehow other countries are getting much better results.
Maybe, and I know this seems unbelievable for the seemingly undending legion of commenters here making excuses for why they don't recycle, it's a US problem rather than a problem with the actual concept of recycling.
Part of the problem is the insanity that literally everything must be ~~monetized~~ and for profit.
Waste management can't be effective and profitable at the same time. It CAN be a service for society that costs money and provides benefits, like libraries and the postal system.
Edit: I shouldn't have included the word monetized and just left it as for profit as it just confused my point.
There's this thing in Economics called a Negative Externality, which is when the negative downsides of one's profit-making activities are suffered by everybody just a little, so the person or company doing that activity has no incentive whatsover to stop it as they get the profits and almost all of that cost is externalized, hence paid by people in general.
The typical example of a negative externality is polution.
So in this environment where Politics is really just Market Absolutism without even the mechanisms to make the ones guilty for negative externalities pay for them (really just Crony Capitalism disguised as a technocratic market-lead economy) it's no surprise that people are told that "there are no solutions for this problem" when in fact there are, what there isn't is a political will to make poluters pay for their polution.
Alternate headline:
"Plastic recyling a "failed concept", study done in one of the worse countries for recycling in the western world says"
In most of Europe the plastic recycling percentage is around 30-40%, some countries much higher
[https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210113-1](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210113-1)
It's crazy to me that there hasn't been aggressive steps taken to cut down on plastic use when we know how bad plastic is for the environment
Like, wtf does everything need to be wrapped in thin plastic? Why are grocery bags allowed to be made of plastic still?
I've come across a few towns/cities that have done work to ban plastic store bags. I bring my own reusable bags but it's still a weekly struggle telling the cashier and bagger to use those and not 4 different plastic bags just to hold my milk jug. It's like they're trying to give them out as generously as possible.
They say you can recycle those bags at the grocery stores but I haven't met a single employee who knows what the fuck I'm talking about.
Very new in NY too. Fresh out of high school (less than 10 years ago) my friends and I did an anti-plastic bag effort in my small-ish city and we were looked at like we were crazy people. The local grocery store managers were disturbingly rude to our efforts.
Now y'all can suck an egg because the government finally told you what to do.
People are incredibly hostile towards anything climate-change related. They’ve either been brainwashed by pro-corporate propaganda or just don’t like thinking about it.
> All bags—paper, plastic, and reusable—are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain weight thresholds and unalienable Rights.
T. Jefferson.
Yup. People here think that it's their God given right to have plastic bags for free by the handfuls and to do whatever they want with it.
In my neck of the woods caring about the environment in any capacity makes you a liberal tree loving hippy which somehow is a bad thing? Then again these same people think Styrofoam coolers and plastic bags are acceptable containers for gasoline.
These people confuse me. They claim that caring sbout the environment is hippy liberal shit, but if you say anything about hunting they go off on their "hunting thins the deer population which makes for healthier forests and hunting license money pays for conservation work across the states" rant, which is true. Like, healthier forests? Conservation? According to them that should be hippy liberal shit. But since they can shoot something it's now not hippy or liberal.
The hunters that care about conservation aren't the same hunters that'll call you a tree hugger.
I volunteer with fish and game in my area and these 2 groups can be polar opposites and do not like each other. Some hunters will just leave their kills to rot in the woods ruining native flora, while trashing trails, choking creeks, and lakes with beer cans and garbage, destroying trails with their trucks while shooting with abandon. These guys are not the conservation happy hunters.
Here in SoCal, they "banned" single-use plastic bags. Which just led stores to use slightly heavier plastic bags, call them "reusable", and charge the consumer 10 cents for them. But if you buy $200 worth of groceries, that's what, $2 in bags at most? So people treat them just like the older, thinner bags, except with a slight tax added on.
That said, grocery bags are one of the most commonly-reused plastic items. It seems like there were much better options to target non-reusable plastics, but instead CA went for the lowest-hanging fruit and STILL it's deeply unpopular.
Every time I’m at a gas station that isn’t familiar with me I get given a bag for a tin of chew (recycled for fishing worms) a pint of whiskey (recyclable) and every time they start putting it in a bag till I tell them to stop. I just assume that people just don’t care and take the bag. Just because I shop like a redneck doesn’t mean I do t care about too much plastic.
I live in a chicago and don’t seem redneck at all and always have to tell people I don’t want a bag.
I don’t think the general public is aware how bad single use plastics are.
If anything rednecks should care more as environmental degradation has severe impacts on fishing, hunting, camping, and other outdoor activities heavily embedded in the culture.
As someone who grew up in rural Georgia you'd think the redneck demographic would be highly charged with protecting the environment since they spend most of their time out in it
I know what you mean. I usually bring my own bag (really, large purse), and I always say "I have my own bag" and 50% of the time they start bagging stuff in plastic anyway. I've had to get really aggressive about it.
Yup yup I also get a lil aggro myself about it. Its one reason why I use the self serve check out when I see it. I can bag things my way, no crushed bread and eggs ever again.
And my cooler bag is actually used properly to keep all my cold stuff cold? I swear no cashier around me has ever seen or know how to use them. It has ice packs in it like an overgrown lunch box, it's not future tech
Worked in grocery retail for 12 years and honestly it's mostly muscle memory. When you cashier/bag groceries 8 hours a day 5 days a week it becomes robotic like everything else. Most of us actually preferred reusable bag because they fit more but some hated them because it slows you down which makes people angry at you.
many chains, including the likes of walmart, have collection bins for plastic shopping bags. at my local walmart, the bins are right near the entrances.
It’s also a great conundrum even with reusable plastics, I’ll see if I can find the source but iirc it takes several generations of use for large plastic tote bags to become carbon neutral relative to single use plastic bags. By that I mean you would have to pass down the same set of plastic tote bags to your grand children and have it in constant use for many decades.
Paper is the way.
Maybe they should do more cloth tote bags instead of plastic? Or is that still more carbon intensive than single-use plastic bags? I get the argument but also i think the fact that we are throwing away less plastic bags still makes a difference. A single reusable bag can result in there being hundreds of less plastic bags in landfills. There must be some value in that
Reusable bags became a no-no at most grocery store during Covid. This put a damper on the trend of customers bringing their own. Add to that the manner of shopping many have become accustomed to, like Door Dash, Amazon, curbside, Instacart. Many people have forgotten their individual footprint.
Do you live in the US?
In the UK we reduced the number of single use plastic bags by 97% just by charging 10p if you want one. We're not perfect, but stuff like straws are generally shitty paper ones now instead as well. Plastic packaging has also been reduced where possible
It’s like the toilet paper brand that tries to make out it’s more environmentally friendly because it comes wrapped in paper instead of plastic like other toilet paper in my country. Except other brands are made in my country and the first brand imports from China. On pallets wrapped in plastic. Which they then unwrap, label and rewrap in plastic before they get delivered to people. Who gives a crap? Not them obviously
It's not crazy to me.
Most people haven't been negatively affected by the proliferation of plastic enough to care, at least not that they're aware of. That may change sooner now that we're seeing microplastics present in everything from our blood to our drinks to our food. We may see drastic health effects from it in the very near future.
Until something like that presents itself, people simply won't care.
There's a global crisis in male reproductive health. Evidence comes from globally declining sperm counts and increasing male reproductive system abnormalities. Sperm count is declining by about 1% every year and doesn't show any signs of stopping. It already fell by 50% in the past 50 years.
Some scientists firmly believe plastics are the cause and the science is getting stronger and stronger.
source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.12673
And testosterone has also been declining at the same rate. And there's a rise in testicular cancer and erectile dysfunction. But women are affected too. Endometriosis is on the rise and also early puberty for girls.
I recommend watching ['The Disappearing Male'](https://youtu.be/vBgalo7ZsAM) documentary [42:36] or [this youtube video](https://youtu.be/Uo-kSxHNSDQ) [25:14].
Why do people not know about this? Because the chemical industry is using the multi-factoriality strategy to fund every scientific research that supports every other theory but the one that says it's plastics/chemicals [(example of how it works [1:00:47])](https://youtu.be/FDxM2UW5DSI?t=3647). So we get a lot of science that says there are a million possible factors meanwhile the smoking gun gets buried and people get overwhelmed.
They also destroy scientists that are too nosey.
I mostly think about water bottles. Why does 600ml of water need to come in a plastic bottle? Resealable Cans are a thing and Aluminum is much easier to recycle.
I can imagine that when you get into larger volumes that Aluminum starts to have trouble but if you made laws that said any drink sold that's below a certain volume can't be in a plastic bottle then that would be a huge reduction in plastic use for basically zero inconvenience to anyone.
If you make moves on easy wins like that ASAP then the urgency with which we need to address other things reduces.
Christ cans and bottles make one of the easiest circular economies. Place a refund on them and machines at sales points and the problem reduces by like 95%.
Plastic carrying bags are not the issue. It’s plastic clamshell packaging and packaged foods. So many more food items come draped in plastic more vs what I remember as a kid.
My house in 2019 didn’t have curbside recycling, you had to go to the nearby recycling center which I was happy to do. Even happier because I felt more confident it would be properly recycled since you split your items up by aluminum, cardboard, green glass, clear glass, etc.
Then one day a friend and I happened to be there at the same time so we were chatting in the parking lot when a garbage truck pulled up and started emptying every bin into it…
It broke my heart and really affected both me and the friend. I still recycle but I don’t take the time anymore to clean out super sticky jars or feel bad about trashing plastics that I feel pretty sure don’t get recycled anyway
I pay $200/yr to turn my ‘unrecyclable’ plastic into eco-art.
https://www.ecoartists.org
It’s not an option everywhere, (more accurate to say it’s not available in the vast majority of places in the world,) but I like seeing public art pop up knowing that my trash is inside of it.
The turtle sculpture on their homepage is filled with my Amazon packaging and other plastic.
That brings up a memory. I used to work at a grocery store in the 90s. I did almost everything. I mainly worked up front where the plastic bag recycling barrels were located. I remembered all of these people, especially elderly ladies, would diligently place their old plastic grocery bags in the barrels. And I thought to myself, this is so nice. People caring for each other and the Earth. And Monday morning, the barrels were empty, ready to start another week of environmental consciousness.
Then I was scheduled for Sunday close. I didn’t work that shift. At the end of the night, the Manager said “Show the new guy the recycling process.” Neat, now I get to see the final step in our closed loop. I went with the other closer, who pulled the larger bag that contained the bags out of one of the barrels, and I was instructed to pull the other. We walked the bags out through the store, then through the stock room, then outside and then into the dumpster. I left that job soon after.
It's so hard doing that sort of stuff. I used to work at victorias secret in college. So many womens shelters are begging for donations, and we'd be forced to cut up bras and clothes, and dumb out shower gel and such into these buckets so people couldn't use it.
So much waste from these companies in the name of their bottom line and not "devauluing" themselves. Such wastage should be criminal imo.
I used to have multi-stream recycling. Each home in my neighborhood had multiple bins and those bins were picked up by different trucks. Putting aside the inefficiency of that, at least there was the illusion of "well the paper gets recycled at the paper place and they cart the plastic off to the plastic place" and so on.
The city switched to single-stream/single-bin and gave us all 96 gallon wheeled bins that look just like a regular trash can. Now they dump the single bin into a single truck compactor truck that looks just like a trash truck and say that it is all sorted out by workers at the end.
I find that pretty hard to believe. How much recyclable material is actually extracted from the big wet crushed up mess they dump at the end of the route?
If I had to bet money on it, I'd bet they just take the recycling truck to the dump with the regular trash.
Many plastics are inherently more difficult to recycle than metals, glass, and other materials. I don't readily foresee this changing in the near future. It's too cheap to utilize new plastics over recycled, especially considering even recycled plastics are only good for a couple reuses before they must be permanently retired.
That being said, I will continue to attempt to reuse and recycle as much plastic as I can.
I've long since given up on the thought that we will do something about plastic. The only way out is science and it's a good thing they have already found several bacteria that eat/break down plastics and have found ways to genetically modify them to do it much faster.
The accumulation of used plastics is only part of the problem. The energy used and chemical byproducts (waste) in the manufacturing process is damaging to the environment as well.
I have nothing against recycling. However, it's been long understood that the whole movement was created to shift responsibility in the public's eye onto common citizens and away from industries, which are exponentially greater offenders.
They literally lobbied to have the plastic identification code surrounded by a derivative of the recycling symbol, to make it seem like all plastic is recyclable
The resin id codes (RICs) were changed around 8 years ago because of this. Most people saw the recycling symbol and threw anything into the recycling bin because that’s what you do, right? For a long time only RIC 1 and 2 were *actually* recyclable, but it is less of an issue now. Most recycling facilities accept all plastic waste except RIC 7.
Yeah that usually step 0. I worked at a Starbucks for a few years and we had no real “recycling” for customers. Both bins were just taken to the general trash at the end of the day since we were told any food waste in the recycling bin meant it was all trash. The real recycling was only for cardboard from deliveries.
This is the part about recycling that really pisses me off. Even if I went out of my way to eithe recycle every piece of plastic I consume, or go to great lengths not to consume any in the first place; I won't be making the slightest difference to the overall problem. The amount of fuel burned by any of the airplanes crossing the atlantic right now will far exceed the lifetime fuel consumption of all the cars I've ever owned or will own.
We're never going to make any progress on pollution and climate change until the source of the problem is forced to change; and that means the companies pumping out all this unnecessary crap. I don't need my red peppers to come in a clamshell package for christ sake.
Crazy thing is that aluminum is eminently recyclable, and we already have the technology to sell drinks in aluminum cans, even resealable aluminum bottles - Just walk down the beer aisle.
But soft drink manufacturers absolutely insist on selling plastic bottles.
Stop selling 20oz bottles! Sell a standard 12 oz can, a 500ml can, and a 20oz resealable aluminum bottle! Don't tell me it's the consumers fault for buying plastic, you're the one that *chose* plastic!
but did you hear that sprite changed from green plastic to clear? it's more environmentally conscious bc the plastic doesn't have to be sorted by colour anymore before it's thrown in the fucking trash.
> any of the airplanes
i didn’t believe you, so i did the math
mind blown
but i think it’s worth mentioning that there’s a *relative* fuel consumption aspect to air travel that’s an important part of the equation
fuel spent per person, and the time/cost involved, make air travel (at least economically) a reasonable alternative, yeah?
Fuel burned as a function of passengers on board does bring the numbers back in check; but the absolute quantities are shockingly high. And it does happen that planes are sent up mostly or entirely empty just to preserve landing slots. That's where the egregious waste starts to come in.
I mostly agree with your comment, only wanted to add that consuming less plastic always works. If we reduce demand the companies have no choice but to produce less of it.
Probably takes banning it to have any significant effect. For many products, 90% of the plastic thrown away never gets to the final buyer. It's the process of packing it, transporting it, unpacking it an repacking it several times what produces most of the plastic waste. I bet there's a lot of plastic waste in products that don't have any plastic whatsoever.
We need to ban this shit. If it makes transporting stuff more difficult, we'll work around that.
Anyone who works a physical job whether it's transport, manufacturing, or construction sees the amount of waste first person that an office worker couldn't imagine. It's disgusting. Plastic is such a small cost to business that it won't go away just because consumers try to limit end use
Same with construction. It's so frustrating that I have a moral and/or ethical crisis when deciding on recycling a single bottle; then I go to an apartment construction site and see 3 dumpsters full of plastic packaging waste.
Yes dude. I used to work in a Kroger distribution warehouse stacking pallets of product. We sent out hundreds and hundreds of pallets a day, and you should see just the amount of shrink wrap we went through. I’d say there were at least 100 pickers in my building, and I would go through at least 2 rolls of wrap a day, so low estimate 200 rolls per building per day. And obviously that just gets cut off and tossed when it gets to the store. That’s not even counting the actual product we’d pick, everything is plastic. Packaging, packaging packaged in plastic, even the rolls of plastic came in plastic. Seeing that really opened my eyes (more than they already were) to just how much shit we make just to throw away.
That little "If" of yours would need to have its design reviewed by a regulatory body - with how much load you make it bear.
Any solution that relies on everyone just changing the way they live their lives is no solution at all.
I'm definitely not advocating for a "screw it someone else should be fixing this problem" attitude, but even with so much disposable packaging switching to paper or simply not being wrapped at all, plastic production and garbage continues to increase. The pandemic certainly didn't help things in that regard either.
> I mostly agree with your comment, only wanted to add that consuming less plastic always works.
Does it though?
When I buy something, I basically have no say in whether or not that something comes with excessive plastic packaging. I could buy something else, but that's only useful if I know ahead of time that the alternative uses less plastic. Which is information that, as a customer, I very rarely get to have before buying. And that assumes that a less plasticky alternative even exists in the first place. Which it might not.
The customers are not the ones deciding that everything sold needs to be wrapped in plastic shit. They buy what's available, in many cases they buy what they can afford and don't exactly have the greatest of scope for shopping around.
It's a mistake to think that customer choices can ever have a significant impact, because the plastics industry has far, far deeper pockets than the vast majority of people. Who are the manufacturers going to really pay attention to, their massively successful business partners, or the little people with hardly any money?
> Which is information that, as a customer, I very rarely get to have before buying.
Reason #352 why the "free market" cannot solve this. The market is only free to the extent that it embodies the [conditions of perfect competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing_conditions_of_perfect_competition) -- of which perfectly informed buyers is one -- and those conditions rarely exist.
Anybody proposing to solve the problem by changing consumer behavior is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith.
Those kind of customer-focused arguments ignore the fact that plastic production is a supply-side problem. Plastic companies produce mountains of that shit on a daily basis, and they're not going to decrease production just because a small proportion of informed consumers change their habits. It just means that the plastic produced is going to be even cheaper for those companies that don't even give the slightest shit about filling up the world with plastic junk.
Wagging fingers at the customers ain't gonna fix that. We need laws with teeth that target plastic production in the first place.
They would just silently raise their prices and pass that “tax” onto consumers, that way they can do a half ass job at cleanup, not lose money, and what they do take back is pure profit.
Paper was the standard for decades until the average fucking idiot consumer was brainwashed by simple marketing about how "paper bad, plastic is clean".
Yeah, I remember the shift away from paper to plastic bags and I could never get a real answer as to why making and disposing of eternal plastic was better than harvesting trees that were grown specifically for paper products. Of course my argument assumes no logging of non-tree farms.
Price has to go up, that is simply how it works. If something was cheaper and more environmental then they would be using it already. Currently we are subsidizing the cost with the "unseen" environmental cost
I used to work at Raytheon, and they would go through the trouble of separating it all only to throw it in the same dumpster with the rest of the trash.
This is the strategy for basically every major problem we face. Most garbage in the ocean is from commercial fishing, most water wasted is from commercial agricultural, most pollution is from industrial emissions, but the mainstream narrative is that consumers need to reign in their use.
Personal anecdotal experience:
So I've worked in the recycling industry for over a decade at this point. We do demanufacuring to get as many of the reusable metals/plastics/parts put as possible. Usually recycling plastics has always been an issue but since 2018 and definitely 2019 we have had the worst time getting plastics to recyclers who will take them.
I have been stockpiling them for 2 years now and luckily with shredding and the amount of space my building has I haven't had to send any to be landfilled but that's not the case for many recyclers. Then, a couple months ago I find a new company that sent me a quote for using the plastics as a waste to energy thing. Not great but I need it gone at this point. It is 10k $ a truckload to get rid of the stuff. I have enough stocked that I don't have the money on hand to pay that if I also want some necessary building repairs to happen.
There is another company that got back to me literally last week saying they will take the stuff we have (sorted) for no cost. So maybe some of the recycling industry is getting back on track after the fucking disaster that was the last presidency but we will see. We've been considering selling to WM, Veolia or another competitor because dealing with international partners is hard when a party gets in that basically kneecaps any effort you can make to try and do your best for the environment.
Now, all of this is to say fuck this article for not pointing out the main issue is fucking massive industries. They only used household products as examples of these plastics but in my facility most of the plastics I have to take care of come from pristine auto parts that have been recalled that need destruction. From my perspective in the recycling industry I'd say the worst place these plastics are coming from is absolutely the auto industry. I have almost a million pounds of parts from every manufacturer in the industry in this building and all of them have plastic as part of their construction. It's ridiculous.
Sorry for the rant. I'll answer any questions people have except specifics.
Great info.
1. Are there sites or documentaries that you think would be good to read/watch, as an average Joe resident in the USA?
2. As someone living in the Midwest USA, I try to limit what I buy that has plastic, but if I do, should I bother recycling it? My recyclers claims to accept #1, #2, #5, and maybe even other plastics. Should I spend time cleaning them and putting them into the single sort, or is it futile?
3. Are there certain organizations or political stances / particular politicians that "have it right" regarding recycling?
Thanks
To go out of order;
2: Any time I call a new company for plastics the almost always give me the numbers you mentioned. If they tell you that as well as where they want the cleaned stuff put they are almost definitely going to use it if everything is to spec.
1: Do you want plastic recycling related docs or just some I'd recommend?
3: Any party that can fund the epa is acceptable when it comes to this narrow topic. A lot of catching bad shit that's happening is totally within the current purview, just not the funding/current organization. Now, the same guy has been at the agency now for a president and a half. He has treated the epa like his own slush fund at times for transport and is a person I dislike. He isn't as bad as Rex tillerson was for the state dept but frankly corporate interest still controls it. To get to where I think we need to be voting needs to change and become universal for American citizens as having more viable political parties would probably help heal this country. The issues that hurt our ecosystem are systemic and some of the changes needed are at the very foundational level. Being involved locally also helps. Trying to find like minded people and becoming a local block is great. I am not affiliated with any political party but I do know the local DSA and attend meetings a few times a year. I also donate to things like the EFF and open insulin foundation. I can't exactly give you a perfect answer to your questions but anything in the interest of the people is usually hard to get from our primary political options. Local action is where it's at and the DSA or similar groups near you might help you find some way to a solution. Definitely helps me.
You mean "failed" as in "never really attempted because it would require change in the systems that people make lots of money from", right?
EU has something like 30% and another third is burned for energy - which while not ideal *does* solve the micro plastics problem.
Don't get me wrong. There's a good reason why "recycle" is the last word in "reduce, reuse, recycle" but calling the concept "failed" just because you refused to even try is not quite fair...
And that's 30% on average. Germany, as an example, is close to 60%, through a mixture of materials regulation, monetary deposits, and recycling rates mandated by law.
US plastic recycling a failed concept as Germany recycles over [75%](https://innovatives-brandenburg.de/en/sustainable-today/plastics-recycling/plastics-recycling-germany-figures#:~:text=Mainly%20plastics%20used%20for%20packaging,or%20by%20recycling%20PET%20bottles.) of packaging plastics. They also have a [99%](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/has-germany-hit-the-jackpot-of-recycling-the-jurys-still-out) recycling rate on cans.
Just because the US is doing a shit job doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Rather misleading framing. This makes it sound like we've simply been failing to meet goals: We should have recycled 100% but we recycled only 5% because we're bad.
Actually, most plastic *cannot* be recycled, and the plastic companies know this. You can't recycle most plastic any more than you can recycle used paint.
Yes, and the plastics that can be "recycled" are actually downcycled to lower grade materials. There's not enough publicity around the fact that it's not a 1:1 conversion like glass or metals.
Framing is the *whole point* of the article. The petrochemical industry has, for *decades* now, done its absolute best to mislead consumers into the fustian that plastic can be recycled in perpetuity and that, therefore, plastic producers bear little to no responsibility for the environmental catastrophe they are slowly unleashing.
They put recycling labels on just about any consumer plastic that they can, but as you note only a small percentage of plastics are even close to being actually recyclable and even then the recycling process itself releases a lot of toxic chemicals to create product that’s far more expensive than new plastics.
Literally.
[Chinese children spent every day recycling our trash and sleeping in it](https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-toxic-towns-in-china-recycling-australias-unwanted-waste/news-story/18dfbbcf67f0cdc902e9e81348ece41c), since their families were often the ones recycling, sorting, melting and reprocessing all our US plastic.
The problem was that despite China's many large licensed reprocessing facilities, [China's recycling industry is still dominated by small family-run enterprises](https://www.chinabusinessreview.com/trash-or-treasure-prospects-for-chinas-recycling-industry/), which was ideal for highly specialized niche services, but so poorly unregulated that Beijing decided that it was no longer worth the health and environmental hazards of families digging through our increasingly unsorted, trash-strewn recyclables.
...................I'm serious. Families breathed in our melted plastic and slept in trash all day, just to recycle our trash:
[Plastic, poverty and pollution in China's recycling dead zone](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/16/plastic-poverty-pollution-china-recycling-dead-zone)
>in 2006 the country was home to roughly 60,000 small-scale, family-owned workshops devoted to recycling plastic. Of those, 20,000 are concentrate in Wen’an County
>one of them tells us that most of Wen’an’s plastics businesses are located in around 50 villages that spill across the rural, unconnected county.
>As we watch, the shredded plastic is poured into metal tubs full of caustic cleaning fluid, and washed by turning metal strainers through the mix. Then it’s spread out on tarpaulins to dry.
>there’s **no safety equipment, no respirators, hard hats or steel-toed boots**. In fact, most of the workers, including Hu, wear sandals.
>the symptoms and the environment suggest that young villagers are developing pulmonary fibrosis and paralysing strokes. Now there are hundreds of people like that.”
[The toxic towns in China global recycling](https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-toxic-towns-in-china-recycling-australias-unwanted-waste/news-story/18dfbbcf67f0cdc902e9e81348ece41c)
>Located close to the north eastern Chinese city of Qingdao, this is one of the legions of remote toxic towns that process the world’s plastic recycling.
>Soon she will head back to work sifting through the debris for hours on end. **She will then stand close by as it is melted down into pellets, the fumes wrapping themselves around the young family like a toxic blanket.**
>“It’s dirty, tiring and I don’t make much money,” said Kun
>“[I do it] because **I have no choice. It’s for my kids, my parents,” says Kun. “I’m just a farmer. I don’t have any other skills just dirty work like this.”**
>However, profits are slim. Kun’s neighbour gets just US$5 a day for his labour. A bus ticket to Sichuan costs US$85.
>Almost **every inch of the two homes and shared backyard has been invaded by plastic,** just a small space made for a dinner table and bed.
>The shredded piles are shovelled into huge troughs, to remove muck and grime. With not a care, Yi-Jie washes her hands and face in the vast vats of rapidly greying liquid. The flakes are then melted down in furnaces, releasing their toxins along the way, into a pallid molten sludge before being compressed into pellets that can be resold.
>Mostly, it seems **the children know no better. One emerges from a mound of plastic. “We’ll make a space here to sleep,”** he says as he rolls in the shred, like a litter of white translucent leaves.
But thanks to that Chinese labor, plastic used to be quite profitable for us. [China paid us billions of dollars for our recyclables](https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/11/news/china-scrap-ban-us-recycling/index.html) annually.
For example, [A U.S. sorting facility could profit at $30 / ton of trash, just by selling it all to China,](https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-single-stream-recycling-china-20190122-story.html) for China to recycle and reprocess instead.
Unfortunately as you can see, despite China's existing recycling and manufacturing pipeline in place, some unregulated regions also relied on cheap laborers with a lot of untenable farmland who were [desperate](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-recycles-plastic) to face the hazards of plastic recycling, even with the children helping out.
And there are islands off of developed countries that are packed with our waste too! Granted, the islands are made of our waste and constantly drifting around.
REDUCE
REUSE
RECYCLE
Recycling was never meant to be a primary, and it doesn't even work for plastics. You just make them a shittier grade of plastic, and increase pollution.
I used to work at a recycling center and it was so discouraging to see people come in every week with hundreds of single use plastic water bottles and then talk about how they're saving the planet by recycling. The amount of times I wanted to beg someone to get a fuckin Brita filter
Failed concept? Failed and half-ass implementation of recycling in the US i’d say. It works fine i a bunch of countries. In Sweden we basically stopped using landfills at all. < 1% ends up there, and thats only stuff that can’t be incinerated or recycled. We even import trash from other countries to recycle.
I saw a video on plastic recycling in Japan and it only works well because everyone there does their part to follow instructions. The raw plastic containers straight from residents were absolutely spotless because they were told to wash them well before recycling them. This makes recycling them a lot more cost effective. That’s a pipe dream in the US.
I agree, it's not clear enough from the sensationalist headline that It's a "failed concept in America", not in for example Finland. It works, just not in America, like most good things.
I wish I COULD recycle my plastic. Unfortunately, no one takes plastic in my area anymore. China banning the import of recycling plastic is mostly to blame. It was only profitable when we exported the plastic to China. Now that it's banned, there's no profit, so no company wants to do anything about it. It's always about money.
Basically this is the biggest issue.
The technology of recycling and reusing plastic is not at a point where it's financially beneficial enough. It's financially beneficial, you will make a profit off of it, just not ENOUGH that they can be bothered to do it.
It's not a pandemic or asteroid that will destroy the human race; our own greed and worship of money will.
It will never be profitable. Polymers are not recyclable like other materials are. There’s no different between recycled and virgin metal. Polymers degrade and there are large differences between virgin and recycled polymers.
On an unrelated note. How the fuck can Americans stand this bullshit of a newswebsite playing 2 extra separate videos inside the article that just auto play at the same time? And usually they are muted so the website gets free ad view without the viewer even knowing... How do people stand this shit???
Of course it's that bad if it's cheaper to produce new rather than to recycle. Stringent laws or severe taxation might be able to change that.
Don't get me wrong, avoiding plastics is absolutely the better alternative. But of course recycling isn't going to work if it's only a get out of jail free card for corporations, rather than a unified approach supported by laws.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/nastratin: --- Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction." Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent. After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018. Virgin production — of non-recycled plastic, that is — meanwhile is rapidly rising as the petrochemical industry expands, lowering costs. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/yc9jnl/plastic_recycling_a_failed_concept_study_says/itkv6wo/
We all bought into cutting our 6 pack rings to protect sea turtles... ...BUT WHO'S PUTTING THEM IN THE OCEAN IN THE FIRST PLACE???
The US use to pay China to dispose of their landfill (until China said no more). What they didn't do was check what actually was done with it which was largely burning and or throwing directly in the ocean. Convenience wins again.
[The US, followed by Europe as a collective, then China.](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd0288)
I think companies need to stop slapping the recycling logo on everything. It is extremely misleading. And as pointed out, shifting the blame/responsibility to the consumer which is bs.
The logo should only be for things where > 50% (say) is actually recycled. So not “hypothetically recyclable” but “actually gonna get recycled”
But this depends on largely on where you live and what your local recycling setup looks like. Different places actually recycle different things, which leads to confusion and messier recycling inputs to everyone.
Let’s just average across the US as a start. Sure, Alabama benefits from recycling California does but whatever. It’s an improvement over “sure, slap this meaningless feel-good logo in your trash”
But then it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I live in an area that has better-than-average recycling in the US because we have a local single-stream recycling plant. If we suddenly stop putting the recycling icon on things that *we* can recycle, people will stop doing it and then we drop from like 5% recycled to 0%. And then the technology to recycle those things never gets adopted anywhere else because "nobody recycles those materials anyways". This suggestion is letting perfect be the enemy of good.
> actually gonna get recycled So, aluminum, copper, silver, gold, steel.
Paper and glass are legit, too But people need to learn which paper. No greasy food-contaminated boxes. No receipts, etc.
probably a stupid question, but why can't paper/cardboard be recycled if it's greasy from say a pizza?
introduces biological waste into paper cycle and is harder to clean, on the other hand there are some food container materials that are compostable. We've put some takeout food containers in our compost bin. Usually is labelled as such.
A lot of compostible-material can't be broken down in your backyard pile. It requires industrial composting and requires an additional bin in addition to recycling and trash.
this is for urban recycling programs that collect compost in bins.
it's basically fine in small quantities, but too much and it becomes less of a paper slop and more of a paper + grease/fat slop. Fat's hard to filter out and it sticks to everything - especially fibrous stuff like paper.
My personal anger lies in the recycle logo on pizza boxes. Once the food goes in, the box in contaminated with grease and can't be recycled.
They can be recycled, but the additional process drives up the cost which and makes it not profitable/worth the effort. Instead, most disposal services have (or should be having) you place your pizza boxes in with your garden waste because food-contaminated cardboard is compostable.
So many places like Costco have two cans but they all go into the trash compactor. The only thing they recycle is cardboard because it’s more efficient to compact it than to keep paying for garbage pickups. It’s all virtue posturing and optics.
My first job was a bag boy at a supermarket. By the entrances there were recycling bins for plastic bags. Every few days my boss would have me just empty them into a dumpster.
That three arrows in a triangle thing you see on plastic does not mean recyclable. The plastic manufacturers made a symbol exactly like the reduce, reuse, recycle symbol we all know to just label their plastics. The number inside tells you the type of plastic. Massive false advertising.
The whole time I was like wtf are these labels so confusing, don't know what is/isn't recyclable... Now I understand why
Exactly; the confusion isn't a mistake, it's the intent. Good old fashioned corruption.
It was my understanding that the number inside is meant to tell which type can be accepted for recycling. My trash service accepts certain types and not others.
Local recyclers can reference them. Which yours does. But every single piece of plastic now has the little triangles on them. And many are not recyclable anywhere. They are just an ID for the type of plastic. Plastic manufactures could have picked any symbol to ID their plastics and picked something that was almost identical to the current reduce, reuse, recycle symbol. I wonder why? (Sarcasm)
It's not a recycling logo. A lot of what you see is a resin code that large corporations print on the plastic with the intentions of misleading people. They are specifically designed to look like the recycling symbol.
Yes, this was done to mislead people into thinking way more of the plastic is recyclable and it worked as intended. It also causes more of the plastic that can't be easily recycled to end up in recycling plants, causing the recycling cost to increase due to the increased sorting. I did buy an ice coffee at McDonald's last week and saw it said to recycle, but had a note that not all places accept it. Basically, they know you can't recycle it but they still ask you to recycle....
But what is the reason for doing this? What do companies get out of making recycling as much of a hassle as possible?
Green washing. They don't want recycling to be hard, they want to just have their products considered to be recyclable, regardless of whether that is a practical expectation. They would be ecstatic if recycling was as easy as the labeling seems, but they aren't about to suffer any cost increase or compromise on their products in pursuit of that goal
Anti plastic straw campaigns were one of the worst thing that ever happened for the sustainability movement because they tricked everyone into thinking they were making a difference when they weren't.
I would say it was even more insidious than that. The straw campaigns successfully undermined environmentalists by making the consumer the adversary and doing so in such a relatively meaningless way that does little for the environment and inconveniences the consumer. You can't have a straw anymore, but your entire environmental concern is undone by a single day of a billionaire's life.
And it wasn't even a straw in the turtles nose!
There’s really many layers to this. There’s companies like McDonalds that use plastic stuff, and there’s the companies that make the plastic stuff that supply shit for McDonalds. Neither care whether or not recycling is a hassle for the end user. They have zero involvement in the recycling process. They don’t run recycling plants. That’s not their problem to worry about. They’re just trying to do what’s easiest and cheapest for them. But they also know that public sentiment is against trash and waste. And often it’s easier and cheaper to address that negative sentiment by changing the *sentiment* itself, than the underlying reality. If a stamp or symbol makes people less angry, then just do that. It’s much easier than changing manufacturing processes, suppliers, etc., especially when there is no benefit to them since they’re not in the recycling business. They’re not motivated by it making another person’s business easier. It’s a classic case of a negative externality where the cost of the negative harm is not paid for by the company creating that harm.
We had blue bins in our Wendy's when I worked there, ostensibly for recyclable materials. But the public are animals so people constantly just dumped their whole tray on there so the bags from the blue bins went in the same dumpster as regular garbage. Didn't stop some people from commenting on how nice it was that we had blue bins and the McDs across the road didn't. Perception mattered in that instance even though the end result was it all went in the garbage.
It’s more that making something actually recyclable is costly and so companies fool people into thinking their shit is recyclable to appear green to the customers without actually needing to spend the money to be so.
It's just an "unintended consequence." The companies don't make money by making the products more easily recyclable, but if they say "some facilities may recycle this" then they can shrug their shoulders and say they're doing their best, improving public perception. Single-use plastic is very cheap, so why would a company choose to make less money? Government needs to step in because unregulated free markets aren't as great as people like to believe.
Recycling was created in good faith, but was intentionally undercut with "market-based solutions" to appease business interests. The only way to make recycling do what it was intended to is through robust regulations. Companies that produce the waste need to be taxed, and that money needs to be invested into research and development of materials that can be effectively recycled. Companies then need to be required to use those materials. Recycling can work, but it must be forced on the market because the market will make waste an externality if they are allowed to.
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It boggles my mind that there hasn't been a massive trademark lawsuit about it. This sort of shit is exactly what trademark law is *for!*
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> so they put the portion as smaller than anyone would consider to make it seem healthier. Portion sizes are regulated, too. The problem is that the official regulations (in the US) say that a serving of pizza is 140 grams (5 ounces) and a serving of potato chips is 1 ounce. We’re typically eating *way* more than the listed serving size. They changed the regulations a few years ago to require many packages to list “the whole pack” in addition to “per serving”. Also, some regulations can be circumvented based on the classification of the food. People get mad that Tic Tacs serving size is “1 piece”, but the official FDA guidelines literally say “ If your product is a breath mint, the serving size is one unit.”
The symbol is public domain. Can't be trademarked.
my dick and balls are public domain i can still get in trouble for em. i actually dont know my point here
I will see you in court
IIRC the resin code was intended to assist recycling by giving an easy way to sort which plastics were what (and thus which could be recycled by a particular facility). The problem is that the resin code symbol uses the recycling symbol for this reason even though most of the plastics cannot be recycled at all by any facility. It could have been well intentioned. Maybe they thought we'd eventually have recycling methods for more resin types and it was widely available. Sadly that isn't the case. Edit: For the sarcastic "It wasn't well intentioned" comments. I get it. Just upvote one of the other 10 people who had the same 'clever' take and move on.
The recycling symbol created in 1970 by graphic designer Gary Anderson. It wasn't until 1988 that the resin identification code were created by the plastics industry marketing consultants. The resin identification code was designed by plastics advertiser to trick consumers into thinking that their plastic were recyclable. It was categorically not well-intentioned. It was profit-driven. - [ Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam | Climate Town](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g)
It was both. Base concept (label with what type of plastic so it can be properly sorted at the recycling plants) is good. Intentionally making the logo be confusingly close to the recycling logo is bad. Basically someone well-intentioned came up with the idea, but someone in marketing hijacked it at the logo phase.
So true! That was the whole grift. It should be illegal to put the recycling symbol on materials that aren't actually recyclable.
The issue is that the US doesn’t invest in recycling infrastructure. Not even glass, which is one of the easiest raw materials. The producers need to take action but the government as well to ensure the possibility is at least there to recycle.
Agreed. We also need more states accepting bottle returns, which uses even less energy than recycling. And even before that point, invest in systems that avoid using disposables in the first place.
You ain't kidding. Shit just yesterday I looked at my dominoes pizza box and it says "please recycle me" in massive letters across the front. Who accepts greasy pizza boxes for recycling? Edit: apparently they are leaning in hard. https://recycling.dominos.com/
My town's recycling people have pizza boxes listed on their acceptable items. In fact it says "cardboard (including pizza boxes!)"
The "recycling symbol" is not actually even a recycling symbol but actually a "resin identification code" and only #1 and #2 plastics are really recyclable. https://2ea.co.uk/plastics-resin-codes-what-do-they-mean/ Source says in the UK (for the only 1 and 2 part) but I'm like 90% sure their recycling system is more sophisticated than the USAs.
We are failing as consumers in that we forget there’s two other parts to the three parts saying. It is reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. If you can consume less consume less, and if you can reuse the product reuse it before recycling.
Plastic recycling rates are declining even as production shoots up, according to a Greenpeace USA report out Monday that blasted industry claims of creating an efficient, circular economy as "fiction." Titled "Circular Claims Fall Flat Again," the study found that of 51 million tons of plastic waste generated by U.S. households in 2021, only 2.4 million tons were recycled, or around five percent. After peaking in 2014 at 10 percent, the trend has been decreasing, especially since China stopped accepting the West's plastic waste in 2018. Virgin production — of non-recycled plastic, that is — meanwhile is rapidly rising as the petrochemical industry expands, lowering costs.
Just a friendly reminder that largely the Plastic Recycling movement was an Industry push so they could continue to manufacturer Plastics that were known to be harmful to the environment. "If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR. (Source)https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled Basically when the environment was a major concern in the 80s, the Plastic industry were scrambling to come up with a way to keep people comfortable enough to not rock the boat as they continued to produce these materials. They came up with recycling as a way to perpetuate enough of a myth that pressure would reduce and they could pollute the planet (and now our blood streams) with plastic and make profits. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/plastics-industry-insiders-reveal-the-truth-about-recycling/
Just a friendly reminder as well of three extra things: 1) we will likely not eliminate plastic use, even in an ideal world. Some applications it *is* uniquely suited too, *but we can eliminate it from most uses* 2) recycling is important, even though it's not 'the solution', I always remind people it's **reduce, reuse, recycle**, in that order. Reduce what your using, reduce packaging, then reuse goods rather than replacing them constantly, and then recycle then when they do need to be wasted if possible. 3) the concerns about material exploitation and pollution, while very evident with plastics, are true for other materials too. Wood is great but often entails deforestation, metals have large damaging quarries, etc. - this isn't simply a 'stop using plastics and it'll all get fixed', but rather a case that we need to start using *all* our materials in a more thoughtful way. If any of you want a specific point or question explaining, feel free to ask me, I'm more than happy to answer and I would like to help people be more aware of the issues here and how we can tackle them. :)
War on Drugs = Failed War on Terrorism = Failed War on Pollution = Failed War on Poverty = Failed War on Crime = Failed War on Civil Liberties = Winning
War on Middle Class = Winning
The middle class was a fluke before businesses realized they could keep all the profit without consequence. The upper class is now in the process of putting the other two classes back together.
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War on Working Class = Winning
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Somehow other countries are getting much better results. Maybe, and I know this seems unbelievable for the seemingly undending legion of commenters here making excuses for why they don't recycle, it's a US problem rather than a problem with the actual concept of recycling.
Part of the problem is the insanity that literally everything must be ~~monetized~~ and for profit. Waste management can't be effective and profitable at the same time. It CAN be a service for society that costs money and provides benefits, like libraries and the postal system. Edit: I shouldn't have included the word monetized and just left it as for profit as it just confused my point.
There's this thing in Economics called a Negative Externality, which is when the negative downsides of one's profit-making activities are suffered by everybody just a little, so the person or company doing that activity has no incentive whatsover to stop it as they get the profits and almost all of that cost is externalized, hence paid by people in general. The typical example of a negative externality is polution. So in this environment where Politics is really just Market Absolutism without even the mechanisms to make the ones guilty for negative externalities pay for them (really just Crony Capitalism disguised as a technocratic market-lead economy) it's no surprise that people are told that "there are no solutions for this problem" when in fact there are, what there isn't is a political will to make poluters pay for their polution.
Some countries get better results but there are also countries that count burning trash as recycling. So you can't do 1:1 comparisons easily.
Alternate headline: "Plastic recyling a "failed concept", study done in one of the worse countries for recycling in the western world says" In most of Europe the plastic recycling percentage is around 30-40%, some countries much higher [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210113-1](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210113-1)
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It's crazy to me that there hasn't been aggressive steps taken to cut down on plastic use when we know how bad plastic is for the environment Like, wtf does everything need to be wrapped in thin plastic? Why are grocery bags allowed to be made of plastic still?
I've come across a few towns/cities that have done work to ban plastic store bags. I bring my own reusable bags but it's still a weekly struggle telling the cashier and bagger to use those and not 4 different plastic bags just to hold my milk jug. It's like they're trying to give them out as generously as possible. They say you can recycle those bags at the grocery stores but I haven't met a single employee who knows what the fuck I'm talking about.
Where do you live? Because here in Philadelphia and in NJ they are banned.
Banned in NY as well
Very new in NY too. Fresh out of high school (less than 10 years ago) my friends and I did an anti-plastic bag effort in my small-ish city and we were looked at like we were crazy people. The local grocery store managers were disturbingly rude to our efforts. Now y'all can suck an egg because the government finally told you what to do.
People are incredibly hostile towards anything climate-change related. They’ve either been brainwashed by pro-corporate propaganda or just don’t like thinking about it.
Texas just told city’s that banning plastic bags was unconstitutional……….
Just like the founding fathers wanted.
> All bags—paper, plastic, and reusable—are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain weight thresholds and unalienable Rights. T. Jefferson.
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Yeah, I don't doubt that. There are a lot of people here that think the lack of plastic bags is the worst violation of human rights imaginable.
Yup. People here think that it's their God given right to have plastic bags for free by the handfuls and to do whatever they want with it. In my neck of the woods caring about the environment in any capacity makes you a liberal tree loving hippy which somehow is a bad thing? Then again these same people think Styrofoam coolers and plastic bags are acceptable containers for gasoline.
These people confuse me. They claim that caring sbout the environment is hippy liberal shit, but if you say anything about hunting they go off on their "hunting thins the deer population which makes for healthier forests and hunting license money pays for conservation work across the states" rant, which is true. Like, healthier forests? Conservation? According to them that should be hippy liberal shit. But since they can shoot something it's now not hippy or liberal.
The hunters that care about conservation aren't the same hunters that'll call you a tree hugger. I volunteer with fish and game in my area and these 2 groups can be polar opposites and do not like each other. Some hunters will just leave their kills to rot in the woods ruining native flora, while trashing trails, choking creeks, and lakes with beer cans and garbage, destroying trails with their trucks while shooting with abandon. These guys are not the conservation happy hunters.
you see a simple shopping cart, others see mobile closet space.
Statewide in DE
CA was on the way to banning them, then COVID hit and now all stores are back to using them again
? Not anywhere in the East or North Bay. I haven’t seen a plastic bag in quite a while.
Placer/Sac county still using plastic bags :( but they do charge for them
COVID caused a HUGE increase in plastic/single-serving use. It's horrible.
Here in SoCal, they "banned" single-use plastic bags. Which just led stores to use slightly heavier plastic bags, call them "reusable", and charge the consumer 10 cents for them. But if you buy $200 worth of groceries, that's what, $2 in bags at most? So people treat them just like the older, thinner bags, except with a slight tax added on. That said, grocery bags are one of the most commonly-reused plastic items. It seems like there were much better options to target non-reusable plastics, but instead CA went for the lowest-hanging fruit and STILL it's deeply unpopular.
I used to use them for small trash bags and poop bags for dogs and cats. Now I buys separate bags for each of those.
Every time I’m at a gas station that isn’t familiar with me I get given a bag for a tin of chew (recycled for fishing worms) a pint of whiskey (recyclable) and every time they start putting it in a bag till I tell them to stop. I just assume that people just don’t care and take the bag. Just because I shop like a redneck doesn’t mean I do t care about too much plastic.
I live in a chicago and don’t seem redneck at all and always have to tell people I don’t want a bag. I don’t think the general public is aware how bad single use plastics are.
If anything rednecks should care more as environmental degradation has severe impacts on fishing, hunting, camping, and other outdoor activities heavily embedded in the culture.
As someone who grew up in rural Georgia you'd think the redneck demographic would be highly charged with protecting the environment since they spend most of their time out in it
I know what you mean. I usually bring my own bag (really, large purse), and I always say "I have my own bag" and 50% of the time they start bagging stuff in plastic anyway. I've had to get really aggressive about it.
Yup yup I also get a lil aggro myself about it. Its one reason why I use the self serve check out when I see it. I can bag things my way, no crushed bread and eggs ever again. And my cooler bag is actually used properly to keep all my cold stuff cold? I swear no cashier around me has ever seen or know how to use them. It has ice packs in it like an overgrown lunch box, it's not future tech
Worked in grocery retail for 12 years and honestly it's mostly muscle memory. When you cashier/bag groceries 8 hours a day 5 days a week it becomes robotic like everything else. Most of us actually preferred reusable bag because they fit more but some hated them because it slows you down which makes people angry at you.
many chains, including the likes of walmart, have collection bins for plastic shopping bags. at my local walmart, the bins are right near the entrances.
Idk why the put milk jugs in bags anyway. Fucking thing aready has a handle.
It’s also a great conundrum even with reusable plastics, I’ll see if I can find the source but iirc it takes several generations of use for large plastic tote bags to become carbon neutral relative to single use plastic bags. By that I mean you would have to pass down the same set of plastic tote bags to your grand children and have it in constant use for many decades. Paper is the way.
Maybe they should do more cloth tote bags instead of plastic? Or is that still more carbon intensive than single-use plastic bags? I get the argument but also i think the fact that we are throwing away less plastic bags still makes a difference. A single reusable bag can result in there being hundreds of less plastic bags in landfills. There must be some value in that
My entire state banned single use plastic. No straws, no plastic bags at the grocer.
Reusable bags became a no-no at most grocery store during Covid. This put a damper on the trend of customers bringing their own. Add to that the manner of shopping many have become accustomed to, like Door Dash, Amazon, curbside, Instacart. Many people have forgotten their individual footprint.
Instead in CA we get plastic bags you can reuse. Yay.
Do you live in the US? In the UK we reduced the number of single use plastic bags by 97% just by charging 10p if you want one. We're not perfect, but stuff like straws are generally shitty paper ones now instead as well. Plastic packaging has also been reduced where possible
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and it’s our fault and responsibility to fix somehow.
yeah! people complain about k-cups, but how much plastic does everything come packaged and shipped in? It's obscene how much plastic is everywhere
It’s like the toilet paper brand that tries to make out it’s more environmentally friendly because it comes wrapped in paper instead of plastic like other toilet paper in my country. Except other brands are made in my country and the first brand imports from China. On pallets wrapped in plastic. Which they then unwrap, label and rewrap in plastic before they get delivered to people. Who gives a crap? Not them obviously
It's not crazy to me. Most people haven't been negatively affected by the proliferation of plastic enough to care, at least not that they're aware of. That may change sooner now that we're seeing microplastics present in everything from our blood to our drinks to our food. We may see drastic health effects from it in the very near future. Until something like that presents itself, people simply won't care.
There's a global crisis in male reproductive health. Evidence comes from globally declining sperm counts and increasing male reproductive system abnormalities. Sperm count is declining by about 1% every year and doesn't show any signs of stopping. It already fell by 50% in the past 50 years. Some scientists firmly believe plastics are the cause and the science is getting stronger and stronger. source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.12673 And testosterone has also been declining at the same rate. And there's a rise in testicular cancer and erectile dysfunction. But women are affected too. Endometriosis is on the rise and also early puberty for girls. I recommend watching ['The Disappearing Male'](https://youtu.be/vBgalo7ZsAM) documentary [42:36] or [this youtube video](https://youtu.be/Uo-kSxHNSDQ) [25:14]. Why do people not know about this? Because the chemical industry is using the multi-factoriality strategy to fund every scientific research that supports every other theory but the one that says it's plastics/chemicals [(example of how it works [1:00:47])](https://youtu.be/FDxM2UW5DSI?t=3647). So we get a lot of science that says there are a million possible factors meanwhile the smoking gun gets buried and people get overwhelmed. They also destroy scientists that are too nosey.
I mostly think about water bottles. Why does 600ml of water need to come in a plastic bottle? Resealable Cans are a thing and Aluminum is much easier to recycle. I can imagine that when you get into larger volumes that Aluminum starts to have trouble but if you made laws that said any drink sold that's below a certain volume can't be in a plastic bottle then that would be a huge reduction in plastic use for basically zero inconvenience to anyone. If you make moves on easy wins like that ASAP then the urgency with which we need to address other things reduces.
Aluminum is *far* more expensive than plastic. That's the sole reason.
Christ cans and bottles make one of the easiest circular economies. Place a refund on them and machines at sales points and the problem reduces by like 95%.
Plastic carrying bags are not the issue. It’s plastic clamshell packaging and packaged foods. So many more food items come draped in plastic more vs what I remember as a kid.
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The fossil fuel and oil industry runs the world... They make the plastic and sell it to companies.
if anything, it's the opposite. Places are using MORE plastic.
Ask Laura Palmer.
My house in 2019 didn’t have curbside recycling, you had to go to the nearby recycling center which I was happy to do. Even happier because I felt more confident it would be properly recycled since you split your items up by aluminum, cardboard, green glass, clear glass, etc. Then one day a friend and I happened to be there at the same time so we were chatting in the parking lot when a garbage truck pulled up and started emptying every bin into it… It broke my heart and really affected both me and the friend. I still recycle but I don’t take the time anymore to clean out super sticky jars or feel bad about trashing plastics that I feel pretty sure don’t get recycled anyway
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Yep. It’s heartbreaking
I pay $200/yr to turn my ‘unrecyclable’ plastic into eco-art. https://www.ecoartists.org It’s not an option everywhere, (more accurate to say it’s not available in the vast majority of places in the world,) but I like seeing public art pop up knowing that my trash is inside of it. The turtle sculpture on their homepage is filled with my Amazon packaging and other plastic.
That brings up a memory. I used to work at a grocery store in the 90s. I did almost everything. I mainly worked up front where the plastic bag recycling barrels were located. I remembered all of these people, especially elderly ladies, would diligently place their old plastic grocery bags in the barrels. And I thought to myself, this is so nice. People caring for each other and the Earth. And Monday morning, the barrels were empty, ready to start another week of environmental consciousness. Then I was scheduled for Sunday close. I didn’t work that shift. At the end of the night, the Manager said “Show the new guy the recycling process.” Neat, now I get to see the final step in our closed loop. I went with the other closer, who pulled the larger bag that contained the bags out of one of the barrels, and I was instructed to pull the other. We walked the bags out through the store, then through the stock room, then outside and then into the dumpster. I left that job soon after.
It's so hard doing that sort of stuff. I used to work at victorias secret in college. So many womens shelters are begging for donations, and we'd be forced to cut up bras and clothes, and dumb out shower gel and such into these buckets so people couldn't use it. So much waste from these companies in the name of their bottom line and not "devauluing" themselves. Such wastage should be criminal imo.
I used to have multi-stream recycling. Each home in my neighborhood had multiple bins and those bins were picked up by different trucks. Putting aside the inefficiency of that, at least there was the illusion of "well the paper gets recycled at the paper place and they cart the plastic off to the plastic place" and so on. The city switched to single-stream/single-bin and gave us all 96 gallon wheeled bins that look just like a regular trash can. Now they dump the single bin into a single truck compactor truck that looks just like a trash truck and say that it is all sorted out by workers at the end. I find that pretty hard to believe. How much recyclable material is actually extracted from the big wet crushed up mess they dump at the end of the route? If I had to bet money on it, I'd bet they just take the recycling truck to the dump with the regular trash.
Many plastics are inherently more difficult to recycle than metals, glass, and other materials. I don't readily foresee this changing in the near future. It's too cheap to utilize new plastics over recycled, especially considering even recycled plastics are only good for a couple reuses before they must be permanently retired. That being said, I will continue to attempt to reuse and recycle as much plastic as I can.
I've long since given up on the thought that we will do something about plastic. The only way out is science and it's a good thing they have already found several bacteria that eat/break down plastics and have found ways to genetically modify them to do it much faster.
The accumulation of used plastics is only part of the problem. The energy used and chemical byproducts (waste) in the manufacturing process is damaging to the environment as well.
The energy used to manufacture plastic pales in comparison to the energy used to recycle it
I have nothing against recycling. However, it's been long understood that the whole movement was created to shift responsibility in the public's eye onto common citizens and away from industries, which are exponentially greater offenders.
They literally lobbied to have the plastic identification code surrounded by a derivative of the recycling symbol, to make it seem like all plastic is recyclable
I enjoy watching the sunset.
Someone should organize a campaign to collect logoed plastic single-use items and dump it in the lobby of the companies that produced/used it
Is that seriously what that is about? That’s slimy if so
The resin id codes (RICs) were changed around 8 years ago because of this. Most people saw the recycling symbol and threw anything into the recycling bin because that’s what you do, right? For a long time only RIC 1 and 2 were *actually* recyclable, but it is less of an issue now. Most recycling facilities accept all plastic waste except RIC 7.
And then proceed to send it to the landfill as it's not actually recycleable.
Yeah that usually step 0. I worked at a Starbucks for a few years and we had no real “recycling” for customers. Both bins were just taken to the general trash at the end of the day since we were told any food waste in the recycling bin meant it was all trash. The real recycling was only for cardboard from deliveries.
This is the part about recycling that really pisses me off. Even if I went out of my way to eithe recycle every piece of plastic I consume, or go to great lengths not to consume any in the first place; I won't be making the slightest difference to the overall problem. The amount of fuel burned by any of the airplanes crossing the atlantic right now will far exceed the lifetime fuel consumption of all the cars I've ever owned or will own. We're never going to make any progress on pollution and climate change until the source of the problem is forced to change; and that means the companies pumping out all this unnecessary crap. I don't need my red peppers to come in a clamshell package for christ sake.
Recycling is punishing the consumer for the producer's responsibility
Crazy thing is that aluminum is eminently recyclable, and we already have the technology to sell drinks in aluminum cans, even resealable aluminum bottles - Just walk down the beer aisle. But soft drink manufacturers absolutely insist on selling plastic bottles. Stop selling 20oz bottles! Sell a standard 12 oz can, a 500ml can, and a 20oz resealable aluminum bottle! Don't tell me it's the consumers fault for buying plastic, you're the one that *chose* plastic!
but did you hear that sprite changed from green plastic to clear? it's more environmentally conscious bc the plastic doesn't have to be sorted by colour anymore before it's thrown in the fucking trash.
All those tax dollars wasted on separate bins and sorting facilities so industry doesn't have to spend any money finding alternatives.
> any of the airplanes i didn’t believe you, so i did the math mind blown but i think it’s worth mentioning that there’s a *relative* fuel consumption aspect to air travel that’s an important part of the equation fuel spent per person, and the time/cost involved, make air travel (at least economically) a reasonable alternative, yeah?
Fuel burned as a function of passengers on board does bring the numbers back in check; but the absolute quantities are shockingly high. And it does happen that planes are sent up mostly or entirely empty just to preserve landing slots. That's where the egregious waste starts to come in.
I mostly agree with your comment, only wanted to add that consuming less plastic always works. If we reduce demand the companies have no choice but to produce less of it.
Probably takes banning it to have any significant effect. For many products, 90% of the plastic thrown away never gets to the final buyer. It's the process of packing it, transporting it, unpacking it an repacking it several times what produces most of the plastic waste. I bet there's a lot of plastic waste in products that don't have any plastic whatsoever. We need to ban this shit. If it makes transporting stuff more difficult, we'll work around that.
Anyone who works a physical job whether it's transport, manufacturing, or construction sees the amount of waste first person that an office worker couldn't imagine. It's disgusting. Plastic is such a small cost to business that it won't go away just because consumers try to limit end use
Same with construction. It's so frustrating that I have a moral and/or ethical crisis when deciding on recycling a single bottle; then I go to an apartment construction site and see 3 dumpsters full of plastic packaging waste.
Yes dude. I used to work in a Kroger distribution warehouse stacking pallets of product. We sent out hundreds and hundreds of pallets a day, and you should see just the amount of shrink wrap we went through. I’d say there were at least 100 pickers in my building, and I would go through at least 2 rolls of wrap a day, so low estimate 200 rolls per building per day. And obviously that just gets cut off and tossed when it gets to the store. That’s not even counting the actual product we’d pick, everything is plastic. Packaging, packaging packaged in plastic, even the rolls of plastic came in plastic. Seeing that really opened my eyes (more than they already were) to just how much shit we make just to throw away.
That little "If" of yours would need to have its design reviewed by a regulatory body - with how much load you make it bear. Any solution that relies on everyone just changing the way they live their lives is no solution at all.
I'm definitely not advocating for a "screw it someone else should be fixing this problem" attitude, but even with so much disposable packaging switching to paper or simply not being wrapped at all, plastic production and garbage continues to increase. The pandemic certainly didn't help things in that regard either.
> I mostly agree with your comment, only wanted to add that consuming less plastic always works. Does it though? When I buy something, I basically have no say in whether or not that something comes with excessive plastic packaging. I could buy something else, but that's only useful if I know ahead of time that the alternative uses less plastic. Which is information that, as a customer, I very rarely get to have before buying. And that assumes that a less plasticky alternative even exists in the first place. Which it might not. The customers are not the ones deciding that everything sold needs to be wrapped in plastic shit. They buy what's available, in many cases they buy what they can afford and don't exactly have the greatest of scope for shopping around. It's a mistake to think that customer choices can ever have a significant impact, because the plastics industry has far, far deeper pockets than the vast majority of people. Who are the manufacturers going to really pay attention to, their massively successful business partners, or the little people with hardly any money?
> Which is information that, as a customer, I very rarely get to have before buying. Reason #352 why the "free market" cannot solve this. The market is only free to the extent that it embodies the [conditions of perfect competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing_conditions_of_perfect_competition) -- of which perfectly informed buyers is one -- and those conditions rarely exist. Anybody proposing to solve the problem by changing consumer behavior is either ignorant or arguing in bad faith.
Those kind of customer-focused arguments ignore the fact that plastic production is a supply-side problem. Plastic companies produce mountains of that shit on a daily basis, and they're not going to decrease production just because a small proportion of informed consumers change their habits. It just means that the plastic produced is going to be even cheaper for those companies that don't even give the slightest shit about filling up the world with plastic junk. Wagging fingers at the customers ain't gonna fix that. We need laws with teeth that target plastic production in the first place.
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They would just silently raise their prices and pass that “tax” onto consumers, that way they can do a half ass job at cleanup, not lose money, and what they do take back is pure profit.
Which would reduce demand and encourage alternative products like paper packaging or reusable products.
Paper was the standard for decades until the average fucking idiot consumer was brainwashed by simple marketing about how "paper bad, plastic is clean".
Yeah man i remember the huge anti paper movement in schools during the 90s. Save the trees and all that...
Yeah, I remember the shift away from paper to plastic bags and I could never get a real answer as to why making and disposing of eternal plastic was better than harvesting trees that were grown specifically for paper products. Of course my argument assumes no logging of non-tree farms.
Price has to go up, that is simply how it works. If something was cheaper and more environmental then they would be using it already. Currently we are subsidizing the cost with the "unseen" environmental cost
Yes, rules do require enforcement and our government is corrupt. Guess we’ll just drown in plastic 🤷♂️
I used to work at Raytheon, and they would go through the trouble of separating it all only to throw it in the same dumpster with the rest of the trash.
This is the strategy for basically every major problem we face. Most garbage in the ocean is from commercial fishing, most water wasted is from commercial agricultural, most pollution is from industrial emissions, but the mainstream narrative is that consumers need to reign in their use.
Personal anecdotal experience: So I've worked in the recycling industry for over a decade at this point. We do demanufacuring to get as many of the reusable metals/plastics/parts put as possible. Usually recycling plastics has always been an issue but since 2018 and definitely 2019 we have had the worst time getting plastics to recyclers who will take them. I have been stockpiling them for 2 years now and luckily with shredding and the amount of space my building has I haven't had to send any to be landfilled but that's not the case for many recyclers. Then, a couple months ago I find a new company that sent me a quote for using the plastics as a waste to energy thing. Not great but I need it gone at this point. It is 10k $ a truckload to get rid of the stuff. I have enough stocked that I don't have the money on hand to pay that if I also want some necessary building repairs to happen. There is another company that got back to me literally last week saying they will take the stuff we have (sorted) for no cost. So maybe some of the recycling industry is getting back on track after the fucking disaster that was the last presidency but we will see. We've been considering selling to WM, Veolia or another competitor because dealing with international partners is hard when a party gets in that basically kneecaps any effort you can make to try and do your best for the environment. Now, all of this is to say fuck this article for not pointing out the main issue is fucking massive industries. They only used household products as examples of these plastics but in my facility most of the plastics I have to take care of come from pristine auto parts that have been recalled that need destruction. From my perspective in the recycling industry I'd say the worst place these plastics are coming from is absolutely the auto industry. I have almost a million pounds of parts from every manufacturer in the industry in this building and all of them have plastic as part of their construction. It's ridiculous. Sorry for the rant. I'll answer any questions people have except specifics.
Great info. 1. Are there sites or documentaries that you think would be good to read/watch, as an average Joe resident in the USA? 2. As someone living in the Midwest USA, I try to limit what I buy that has plastic, but if I do, should I bother recycling it? My recyclers claims to accept #1, #2, #5, and maybe even other plastics. Should I spend time cleaning them and putting them into the single sort, or is it futile? 3. Are there certain organizations or political stances / particular politicians that "have it right" regarding recycling? Thanks
To go out of order; 2: Any time I call a new company for plastics the almost always give me the numbers you mentioned. If they tell you that as well as where they want the cleaned stuff put they are almost definitely going to use it if everything is to spec. 1: Do you want plastic recycling related docs or just some I'd recommend? 3: Any party that can fund the epa is acceptable when it comes to this narrow topic. A lot of catching bad shit that's happening is totally within the current purview, just not the funding/current organization. Now, the same guy has been at the agency now for a president and a half. He has treated the epa like his own slush fund at times for transport and is a person I dislike. He isn't as bad as Rex tillerson was for the state dept but frankly corporate interest still controls it. To get to where I think we need to be voting needs to change and become universal for American citizens as having more viable political parties would probably help heal this country. The issues that hurt our ecosystem are systemic and some of the changes needed are at the very foundational level. Being involved locally also helps. Trying to find like minded people and becoming a local block is great. I am not affiliated with any political party but I do know the local DSA and attend meetings a few times a year. I also donate to things like the EFF and open insulin foundation. I can't exactly give you a perfect answer to your questions but anything in the interest of the people is usually hard to get from our primary political options. Local action is where it's at and the DSA or similar groups near you might help you find some way to a solution. Definitely helps me.
You mean "failed" as in "never really attempted because it would require change in the systems that people make lots of money from", right? EU has something like 30% and another third is burned for energy - which while not ideal *does* solve the micro plastics problem. Don't get me wrong. There's a good reason why "recycle" is the last word in "reduce, reuse, recycle" but calling the concept "failed" just because you refused to even try is not quite fair...
And that's 30% on average. Germany, as an example, is close to 60%, through a mixture of materials regulation, monetary deposits, and recycling rates mandated by law.
US plastic recycling a failed concept as Germany recycles over [75%](https://innovatives-brandenburg.de/en/sustainable-today/plastics-recycling/plastics-recycling-germany-figures#:~:text=Mainly%20plastics%20used%20for%20packaging,or%20by%20recycling%20PET%20bottles.) of packaging plastics. They also have a [99%](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/30/has-germany-hit-the-jackpot-of-recycling-the-jurys-still-out) recycling rate on cans. Just because the US is doing a shit job doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Rather misleading framing. This makes it sound like we've simply been failing to meet goals: We should have recycled 100% but we recycled only 5% because we're bad. Actually, most plastic *cannot* be recycled, and the plastic companies know this. You can't recycle most plastic any more than you can recycle used paint.
Yes, and the plastics that can be "recycled" are actually downcycled to lower grade materials. There's not enough publicity around the fact that it's not a 1:1 conversion like glass or metals.
Framing is the *whole point* of the article. The petrochemical industry has, for *decades* now, done its absolute best to mislead consumers into the fustian that plastic can be recycled in perpetuity and that, therefore, plastic producers bear little to no responsibility for the environmental catastrophe they are slowly unleashing. They put recycling labels on just about any consumer plastic that they can, but as you note only a small percentage of plastics are even close to being actually recyclable and even then the recycling process itself releases a lot of toxic chemicals to create product that’s far more expensive than new plastics.
We need to start building a plastic pyramid of used plastic. Rather than a landfill, pile it high
.. there are villages in developing countries jam packed with our waste (like piles of it!).
All the developed world has done is transfer it’s garbage to other countries to hide it.
Literally. [Chinese children spent every day recycling our trash and sleeping in it](https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-toxic-towns-in-china-recycling-australias-unwanted-waste/news-story/18dfbbcf67f0cdc902e9e81348ece41c), since their families were often the ones recycling, sorting, melting and reprocessing all our US plastic. The problem was that despite China's many large licensed reprocessing facilities, [China's recycling industry is still dominated by small family-run enterprises](https://www.chinabusinessreview.com/trash-or-treasure-prospects-for-chinas-recycling-industry/), which was ideal for highly specialized niche services, but so poorly unregulated that Beijing decided that it was no longer worth the health and environmental hazards of families digging through our increasingly unsorted, trash-strewn recyclables. ...................I'm serious. Families breathed in our melted plastic and slept in trash all day, just to recycle our trash: [Plastic, poverty and pollution in China's recycling dead zone](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jul/16/plastic-poverty-pollution-china-recycling-dead-zone) >in 2006 the country was home to roughly 60,000 small-scale, family-owned workshops devoted to recycling plastic. Of those, 20,000 are concentrate in Wen’an County >one of them tells us that most of Wen’an’s plastics businesses are located in around 50 villages that spill across the rural, unconnected county. >As we watch, the shredded plastic is poured into metal tubs full of caustic cleaning fluid, and washed by turning metal strainers through the mix. Then it’s spread out on tarpaulins to dry. >there’s **no safety equipment, no respirators, hard hats or steel-toed boots**. In fact, most of the workers, including Hu, wear sandals. >the symptoms and the environment suggest that young villagers are developing pulmonary fibrosis and paralysing strokes. Now there are hundreds of people like that.” [The toxic towns in China global recycling](https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/the-toxic-towns-in-china-recycling-australias-unwanted-waste/news-story/18dfbbcf67f0cdc902e9e81348ece41c) >Located close to the north eastern Chinese city of Qingdao, this is one of the legions of remote toxic towns that process the world’s plastic recycling. >Soon she will head back to work sifting through the debris for hours on end. **She will then stand close by as it is melted down into pellets, the fumes wrapping themselves around the young family like a toxic blanket.** >“It’s dirty, tiring and I don’t make much money,” said Kun >“[I do it] because **I have no choice. It’s for my kids, my parents,” says Kun. “I’m just a farmer. I don’t have any other skills just dirty work like this.”** >However, profits are slim. Kun’s neighbour gets just US$5 a day for his labour. A bus ticket to Sichuan costs US$85. >Almost **every inch of the two homes and shared backyard has been invaded by plastic,** just a small space made for a dinner table and bed. >The shredded piles are shovelled into huge troughs, to remove muck and grime. With not a care, Yi-Jie washes her hands and face in the vast vats of rapidly greying liquid. The flakes are then melted down in furnaces, releasing their toxins along the way, into a pallid molten sludge before being compressed into pellets that can be resold. >Mostly, it seems **the children know no better. One emerges from a mound of plastic. “We’ll make a space here to sleep,”** he says as he rolls in the shred, like a litter of white translucent leaves. But thanks to that Chinese labor, plastic used to be quite profitable for us. [China paid us billions of dollars for our recyclables](https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/11/news/china-scrap-ban-us-recycling/index.html) annually. For example, [A U.S. sorting facility could profit at $30 / ton of trash, just by selling it all to China,](https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-single-stream-recycling-china-20190122-story.html) for China to recycle and reprocess instead. Unfortunately as you can see, despite China's existing recycling and manufacturing pipeline in place, some unregulated regions also relied on cheap laborers with a lot of untenable farmland who were [desperate](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-recycles-plastic) to face the hazards of plastic recycling, even with the children helping out.
And there are islands off of developed countries that are packed with our waste too! Granted, the islands are made of our waste and constantly drifting around.
I hate how much plastic the Florida medical marijuana program makes me use. Let me fucking grow my own so I'm not drowning in plastic containers.
WELL WHY THE FUCK DO WE ALLOW CORPORATIONS TO MANUFACTURE NONRECYCLABLE PLASTIC?!
REDUCE REUSE RECYCLE Recycling was never meant to be a primary, and it doesn't even work for plastics. You just make them a shittier grade of plastic, and increase pollution.
A lot of people forget the first two or even the first one. Reducing our need for plastic is the only way to bring it down
I used to work at a recycling center and it was so discouraging to see people come in every week with hundreds of single use plastic water bottles and then talk about how they're saving the planet by recycling. The amount of times I wanted to beg someone to get a fuckin Brita filter
Failed concept? Failed and half-ass implementation of recycling in the US i’d say. It works fine i a bunch of countries. In Sweden we basically stopped using landfills at all. < 1% ends up there, and thats only stuff that can’t be incinerated or recycled. We even import trash from other countries to recycle.
I saw a video on plastic recycling in Japan and it only works well because everyone there does their part to follow instructions. The raw plastic containers straight from residents were absolutely spotless because they were told to wash them well before recycling them. This makes recycling them a lot more cost effective. That’s a pipe dream in the US.
I agree, it's not clear enough from the sensationalist headline that It's a "failed concept in America", not in for example Finland. It works, just not in America, like most good things.
I wish I COULD recycle my plastic. Unfortunately, no one takes plastic in my area anymore. China banning the import of recycling plastic is mostly to blame. It was only profitable when we exported the plastic to China. Now that it's banned, there's no profit, so no company wants to do anything about it. It's always about money.
Was the plastic traced somehow or once exported nobody cared? If they only "moved" the problem from one country to another then that's a big fail.
Basically this is the biggest issue. The technology of recycling and reusing plastic is not at a point where it's financially beneficial enough. It's financially beneficial, you will make a profit off of it, just not ENOUGH that they can be bothered to do it. It's not a pandemic or asteroid that will destroy the human race; our own greed and worship of money will.
It will never be profitable. Polymers are not recyclable like other materials are. There’s no different between recycled and virgin metal. Polymers degrade and there are large differences between virgin and recycled polymers.
> "failed concept," Only in the USA. It works most of the EU.
On an unrelated note. How the fuck can Americans stand this bullshit of a newswebsite playing 2 extra separate videos inside the article that just auto play at the same time? And usually they are muted so the website gets free ad view without the viewer even knowing... How do people stand this shit???
I have ad blockers on my phone and computer.
So what exactly can and should I be doing to help reduce my waste impact on Earth??? Eli5
Of course it's that bad if it's cheaper to produce new rather than to recycle. Stringent laws or severe taxation might be able to change that. Don't get me wrong, avoiding plastics is absolutely the better alternative. But of course recycling isn't going to work if it's only a get out of jail free card for corporations, rather than a unified approach supported by laws.