[zhrvoj]

Welcome to the truth. Tires wear and all of that stays on the road, or next to the roads, seas, oceans. Years...tires... And then, we have to sort each plastic HDPE bag to save the Earth. Feel guilt if we don't. Ok that. I hope that they are sorting waste in Ukraine. Otherwise, my efforts are in vane.

[nirvdrum]

The indignity! Don't do it if you don't want to, but let's not pretend sorting a plastic bag is a major imposition. Just because something is a worse polluter doesn't mean we can't improve anything else.

[ejb999]

sort them if you want, but more than 90% of the stuff that is sorted and 'recycled' doesn't actually get recycled - its gets buried or burned just like regular trash.

Much better to not generate it in the first place, i.e. make a conscious effort to reduce what you buy and consume where possible.

"This will likely come as no surprise to longtime readers, but according to National Geographic, an astonishing 91 percent of plastic doesn’t actually get recycled. This means that only around 9 percent is being recycled. As if that weren’t enough, nearly all of that plastic that does get recycled is actually downcycled, which means it gets less and less useful every time, eventually becoming so flimsy that it can no longer be recycled properly.

As it is, that 91 percent just sits in landfills, piling up and breaking down slowly into arguably more dangerous microplastics. National Geographic reports that by 2050, approximately 12 billion metric tons of plastic will be sitting in landfills across the globe. For scale, that amount of plastic weighs approximately 35,000 times more than the whole Empire State Building."