This is a good article that has almost nothing to do with the title. The title implies that once you put your plastic in the recycling it isn't actually recycled—this may or may not be true, but the article doesn't say either way. Unlike what would be implied by the title and the comments here so far, they actually have a pretty positive view of recycling programs, they just argue that they're not sufficient.
What the article is actually about is how recycling programs don't actually end up receiving most of the plastic that is consumed, and how even if they did it wouldn't be enough to solve the problem. We need to actually use less plastic in the first place, not recycle it once only to have it enter a landfill on the second use.
Ever since ive learned that recycling is basically a scam perpetuated by the plastic industry ive been disgusted with how much plastic there is everywhere all the time. Its impossible not to interact with a vast amount of plastic in our daily lives. Hell, i wear plastic around all day. Its gross... Not that i dont support recycling, it just isnt the answer that the plastic industry pretends it is. We need to reduce! Massively!
It's terrible, plastic recycling is a myth told by the petrol industry, that purposefully messed up the recycling labels and greenwashed the entire industry.
It's physically not possible to recycle plastic and get the same propriety back. About 10% of the plastic is "recycled" worlwide, meaning it's been reused to do something else but can't be used for the same thing (e.g: bottle -> insulation)
One fascinating thing is that on the one hand, the petrol industry messed up the recycling labels, but meanwhile, I am being made responsible by my government for the amount of plastic "I create".
When you quote a number like 10% you need to be more specific what you mean, and preferably provide a source.
Most of the percentages I see quoted are percent of plastic in the entire use stream that ends up recycled, but then people interpret it as "there's no point in putting plastic in the recycling because it has a 1 in 10 chance of being recycled". But that's not what the number means, the number means that most plastic doesn't even get to a recycling center.
Good article, but unfortunately it propagates the oft quoted "you eat a credit card worth of plastic each week" myth. Good video here explaining why it likely isn't true https://youtu.be/2Ntp6BqhSng
Given the studies on microplastics i.e. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34484127/ I don't think it's necessary to minimize the situation. If anything it needs more attention.
As the article and other commenters have mentioned: The fate of plastics that end up in the recycling bin is complicated, but that doesn’t mean it all goes into the trash.
I’ve been fascinated by how much the cynics, contrarians, and people with certain political leanings latch on to this story and exaggerate it. I worked on a large campus where rumors began to spread after they installed recycling bins. The rumors, fueled by stories like this one, escalated to the point that some people insisted that the maintenance crew was secretly collecting recycling bins and dumping them into the trash at night when nobody was watching. They all had variations of the myth claiming they knew a guy who saw it happen one night or they talked to a friend who knows the maintenance people who admitted it was all fake. I endured some painful lectures from older people who explained that recycling was actually a psyop conducted to train us to be obedient because that’s how the elites wanted us to be. People in this camp stopped recycling aluminum and glass on principal, defiantly throwing it in the garbage and making a big deal about it in the process.
Eventually we got an email newsletter explaining where the recycling goes, what the recycling pickup company does with it, and including photos of where it ends up. This didn’t stop the hardcore conspiracy theorists, but it did stop the recycling wars from being a constant topic of debate.
And yet no national government will ban single use plastic bottles.
Where I live we are back to paper grocery bags, which I like better. But I can drive a few miles in state to get plastic bags for groceries.
I am old enough to have seen paper and glass replaced by plastic, time to go back and charge at least 1 USD per bottle to encourage recycling instead of 5 Cents. For people out side of the US, we are almost at the point were nothing costs less than 1 USD.
> And yet no national government will ban single use plastic bottles.
The Nordic countries have a deposit system by which the population is highly incentivized to return the bottle to the supermarket, the deposit is so high and one can get cash back, not just store credit. Even if a consumer feels well-off enough to just throw the bottle in a normal bin (or, as often the case with people boozing in parks, is too drunk to dispose of the bottle), hungry students or migrants will seize on the chance to return the bottle themselves and get the deposit back. This system seems so effective that no one even talks about a ban.
that is the annoying thing of all of this. plastic one use bottles have a nice use in some cases. we at one point had a very nice reduce reuse recycle system in place for glass bottles. the caps were easy to pick out with magnets and the bottles could be reused hundreds of times before being needed to be crushed up into more bottles. it was also in the best interest of the companies to reduce how many bottles were out there. then we upended the whole thing thinking we can recycle the plastic.
If you live in a well run democratic society, then your plastic packaging waste has a good chance of being recycled or incenerated with energy recovery:
The real shame is that plastic is used on so many immediately disposable things like packaging. Plastics have so many legitimate uses with no other material substitute, the fact that we just throw away so much of it needlessly is a huge part of the problem.
I think education is a major issue here. I know I used to recycle plastics, but after reading through comments on here, I would rather just throw it in the trash and know it will be at a landfill. This makes me feel better than the alternative, in which it is sent overseas and more likely to be dispersed throughout the environment.
Read the actual article rather than the comments here. The article doesn't say that your recycling that goes to recycling plant doesn't get recycled. It says that most plastic doesn't even make it to the plant, and even the plastic that does can only be recycled the one time.
The article does not argue that we should not bother recycling, it argues that in addition to recycling we need to stop plastic at the source. It just has a bad title that sparked an unrelated conversation on HN.
1. Go to McDonalds and read the recycle notice on their drink cups.
2. Ask an employee if they recycle those drink cups.
3. Then go out into McDonalds parking lot and notice that their garbage containers do not separate out drink cups for recycling.
And this is the same whether the city that the McDonalds is in recycles plastic or not.
Ultimately it's clear that we need to accept the disruption and lobby our governments to just ban single-use plastics entirely. The amount of microplastics we're seeing in samples across the world in addition to the general pollution and hazards they cause poses a problem.
Well I'm old enough to have lived during Ceaușescu's times for a while and I remember very little plastic from back then.
Plastic bottles were basically unheard of. Glass or metal containers it was and they were also recycled. Bags were mostly cloth. Again, no plastic. So it's definitely possible to live in a much-less plastic polluted world.
Unfortunately we live in the society of "It's pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, but it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort that what it takes to just wash the spoon when you're done with it..."
Common plastic trash, AFAICT, is one of the least unpleasant kinds of trash. It's not toxic, it's not runny and does not get into the water table, it does not decompose into noxious gases, it does not self-ignite and does not burn easily, it can be compacted quite a lot.
I think storing waste plastic in a dry place, some desert, covered from wind, might be a pretty good solution, until we find a way to recycle this huge pile of simple organic molecules.
I assume my plastic recycling is what my council states - that it is burned (with the exhaust passing through scrubbers) to produce steam which is used to heat local businesses and public buildings, and generate a small amount of electricty, then the melted slag is collected and used as an asphalt replacement in road maintenance.
It seems fair enough, maybe not ideal, but it generates some extra use from the waste.
I wonder why there hasn’t been more effort behind replacing single use plastics for food/beverages. People get all up in arms about plastic straws, but then stick their paper straw in a big plastic single-use cup.
I also find it sad that some companies like Snapple are regressing, changing from glass to plastic bottles.
Ever since 2015, when China said that they know would no longer buy American waste plastic, it just gets sent to landfill. Almost all municipal plastic recycling programs in America have shut down.
I thought that this was mostly known that for a long time our "recycled" stuff was getting shipped to China and burned. That ended not that long ago so I wonder what they're actually doing with it now. Maybe actually recycling it perhaps?
It's a shame that this stuff is happening. Lots of feel good measures that aren't helping anything.
The article does not claim that recycling programs don't actually recycle, it just has a really bad title given to it by a really bad editor.
What the article is actually about is how not enough plastic ends up at the recycling center in the first place, and how even if it did it couldn't be recycled a second time, so we still need to stop plastic at the source.
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
What the article is actually about is how recycling programs don't actually end up receiving most of the plastic that is consumed, and how even if they did it wouldn't be enough to solve the problem. We need to actually use less plastic in the first place, not recycle it once only to have it enter a landfill on the second use.
[+] [-] avery17|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h1fra|2 years ago|reply
It's physically not possible to recycle plastic and get the same propriety back. About 10% of the plastic is "recycled" worlwide, meaning it's been reused to do something else but can't be used for the same thing (e.g: bottle -> insulation)
[+] [-] varjag|2 years ago|reply
In EU 42.1% plastics are recycled, 39.3% are burned as fuel and 18.5% go to landfill. So it's absolutely possible to do better than 10%.
https://circulareconomy.europa.eu/platform/sites/default/fil...
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokai|2 years ago|reply
Eh no, why would that be? Where I live 87% of all recycled plastic bottles are reused for new bottles.
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
Most of the percentages I see quoted are percent of plastic in the entire use stream that ends up recycled, but then people interpret it as "there's no point in putting plastic in the recycling because it has a 1 in 10 chance of being recycled". But that's not what the number means, the number means that most plastic doesn't even get to a recycling center.
[+] [-] Kuinox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kuinox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackeman300|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user3939382|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aurornis|2 years ago|reply
I’ve been fascinated by how much the cynics, contrarians, and people with certain political leanings latch on to this story and exaggerate it. I worked on a large campus where rumors began to spread after they installed recycling bins. The rumors, fueled by stories like this one, escalated to the point that some people insisted that the maintenance crew was secretly collecting recycling bins and dumping them into the trash at night when nobody was watching. They all had variations of the myth claiming they knew a guy who saw it happen one night or they talked to a friend who knows the maintenance people who admitted it was all fake. I endured some painful lectures from older people who explained that recycling was actually a psyop conducted to train us to be obedient because that’s how the elites wanted us to be. People in this camp stopped recycling aluminum and glass on principal, defiantly throwing it in the garbage and making a big deal about it in the process.
Eventually we got an email newsletter explaining where the recycling goes, what the recycling pickup company does with it, and including photos of where it ends up. This didn’t stop the hardcore conspiracy theorists, but it did stop the recycling wars from being a constant topic of debate.
[+] [-] jmclnx|2 years ago|reply
Where I live we are back to paper grocery bags, which I like better. But I can drive a few miles in state to get plastic bags for groceries.
I am old enough to have seen paper and glass replaced by plastic, time to go back and charge at least 1 USD per bottle to encourage recycling instead of 5 Cents. For people out side of the US, we are almost at the point were nothing costs less than 1 USD.
[+] [-] bzzzt|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OfSanguineFire|2 years ago|reply
The Nordic countries have a deposit system by which the population is highly incentivized to return the bottle to the supermarket, the deposit is so high and one can get cash back, not just store credit. Even if a consumer feels well-off enough to just throw the bottle in a normal bin (or, as often the case with people boozing in parks, is too drunk to dispose of the bottle), hungry students or migrants will seize on the chance to return the bottle themselves and get the deposit back. This system seems so effective that no one even talks about a ban.
[+] [-] sumtechguy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|2 years ago|reply
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
[+] [-] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
Turns out the amount of energy recovered pays for the whole process.
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chpatrick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1234letshaveatw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadc0de5|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doubleg72|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
The article does not argue that we should not bother recycling, it argues that in addition to recycling we need to stop plastic at the source. It just has a bad title that sparked an unrelated conversation on HN.
[+] [-] fredgrott|2 years ago|reply
1. Go to McDonalds and read the recycle notice on their drink cups. 2. Ask an employee if they recycle those drink cups. 3. Then go out into McDonalds parking lot and notice that their garbage containers do not separate out drink cups for recycling.
And this is the same whether the city that the McDonalds is in recycles plastic or not.
[+] [-] fzeroracer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelRo|2 years ago|reply
Plastic bottles were basically unheard of. Glass or metal containers it was and they were also recycled. Bags were mostly cloth. Again, no plastic. So it's definitely possible to live in a much-less plastic polluted world.
Unfortunately we live in the society of "It's pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, but it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort that what it takes to just wash the spoon when you're done with it..."
[+] [-] oldbbsnickname|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps we should consider taxing plastic on the producer side until renewable, durable, and recyclable materials are substituted.
[+] [-] nine_k|2 years ago|reply
I think storing waste plastic in a dry place, some desert, covered from wind, might be a pretty good solution, until we find a way to recycle this huge pile of simple organic molecules.
[+] [-] NikkiA|2 years ago|reply
It seems fair enough, maybe not ideal, but it generates some extra use from the waste.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jbotdev|2 years ago|reply
I also find it sad that some companies like Snapple are regressing, changing from glass to plastic bottles.
[+] [-] Simulacra|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cainxinth|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freitzkriesler2|2 years ago|reply
It's a shame that this stuff is happening. Lots of feel good measures that aren't helping anything.
[+] [-] lolinder|2 years ago|reply
What the article is actually about is how not enough plastic ends up at the recycling center in the first place, and how even if it did it couldn't be recycled a second time, so we still need to stop plastic at the source.