Who is old enough to remember the McDLT?
And it was dropped because when McDonalds stopped using styrofoam they couldn't make it work any more.
There is an irony in that. We went from a society that uses styrofoam to paper cups. Never mind that styrofoam is one of the most easily recycled substances we have, while the wax on paper cups makes them destined for the landfill.
Is that actually true? I've always heard to put styrofoam in trash rather than recycling.
I had a friend whose father was a chemical engineer back in the 1980s who did a study on it. The cost per cubic yard to recycle styrofoam was insanely cheap. It was just that it required a specialized process that nobody implemented because creating more was also cheap. So it wasn't recycled, but it could have been.
The problem is that there is no money to be made from selling recycled styrofoam since it is competing with products that are themselves extremely cheap. If we imposed a high enough tax on the original product, then it would be cost effective. However we still have the trouble that we have to collect it, separate it out from other wastes in the waste stream, and so on.
So we could recycle styrofoam. But we don't because it is not cost effective to do so. So it is viewed as unrecyclable. And for that reason we have replaced it with things that are even less recyclable.
No wonder. Maybe volume is not the good metric to look at when comparing styrofoam to paper.
Styrofoam is insanely bulky. The same orders could be filled with a fraction of the volume of paper.
You can't recycle wax paper cups. But they'll either break down in the landfill, which is fine. Or they won't, which is a form of carbon capture, which is also fine. You can also burn it for energy.
Still consider this. Things decompose only slowly in a landfill. But when they do, they decomposed into methane because it is a low oxygen environment. And methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is.
Therefore "they'll break down in the landfill" is not as fine as you think it is. The fact that styrofoam will NOT breakdown in a landfill makes it ACTUALLY better as a form of carbon capture. (Although the carbon being captured is actually from fossil fuels, so at best it can be net neutral.)