Americans' plastic recycling is dumped in landfills, investigation shows

I've started, to the greatest extent possible and practical, eliminating single-use plastics from my life.

If something comes in either a metal can and and a plastic pouch, even if it is more expensive I'll buy the metal can version.

A glass jar can be recycled or will break down into sand, a metal can can be recycled or turn into rust, a paper or cardboard container may be recyclable and will break down into mush.

A plastic bag or jar is unlikely to be recycled and the polymer chains that it is made up of will remain on earth for a human-scale definition of "forever" slowly breaking down into microscopic pieces that get into the water and are carried by slight breezes.

Hopefully, one day, soon, single-use plastics will be seen as a colossal mistake on par with lead in gasoline, radium clocks, asbestos tiles, and dumping industrial waste into waterways.

Small changes add up. I have a container of yogurt nearly every day. That's ~350 plastic cups into the fake "recycling" stream every year. Last year I started weaning myself off plastics and now make my own yogurt in an Instant Pot. It takes minutes of effort spread over 9 hours. The milk I get comes in a glass jar from a local CSA that reuses the jars when I return them for more milk and then I put the yogurt in mason jars.

20 years from now those mason jars will still be usable and 7,000 plastic cups will have not been consumed, "recycled", shipped to Asia, and burned in open pits.

Please just spend a couple of minutes and think of how you can lower your plastic use.

Plastic recycling is like a horseshoe theory of politics thing. Most of this article could have come from an article actually advocating for landfilling plastic funded by plastics manufacturers who fear recycled plastic as conpetition, but I guess the actual target audience is people who get so angry about the unrecycled or unrecyclable plastics that they go off in the opposite direction and want plastics banned by governments entirely.

Some months ago I defended the herbal beverages made with various medicinal plant extracts: Kola Nut, Coca Leaf, root extracts, etc [1]. In that post I spoke of having a 2-Liter bottle of the classic herbal beverage for when it seemed like my blood sugar was getting a little low.

In recent months I've decided that even though the 2L bottles are probably cheaper on a per-ounce basis, my waste 2L bottles were contributing to the plastic problem. I've switched to buying 12 ounce cans, which I open and pour into a glass.

My last purchase of Kola was as boxed 12-packs (no plastic in the packaging, other than possibly in the can liner [2]). I save my cans, and will be taking them to a local salvage yard to be properly recycled.

My trash company supposedly has "single stream" recycling, but I doubt they find all the aluminum cans the waste stream.

In drafting this comment I found a Wired story about the engineering that goes into can production [2]. My cans probably have BPA liners -- "hmm". Maybe I'll buy some Kola nuts and make my own herbal beverage.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17979670 [2] https://www.wired.com/2015/03/secret-life-aluminum-can-true-...