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Comment by danhak | Hacker News Reader

I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle.

One of the biggest catastrophes of environmental policy was to shift the burden of plastic waste away from corporations and onto the consumer.

Corporations can pump out as much single-use trash as they wish, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious and manage the waste they produce. Classic tragedy of the commons.

It should have been a matter of Federal policy, not individual choice. Just like the (successful) ban of lead-based paint and CFC's.

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the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious

If you live in the United States or Europe, if you throw plastic away in the trash, there is virtually zero chance that it ends up in the ocean. To get plastic into the ocean in the US you would have to throw it in a storm drain that drains to the ocean, throw it directly into the ocean, or throw it into a river. The garbage patch is almost all coming from other countries that dump trash into rivers or the ocean.

The local trash company gives the plastic to another company who pretends to handle recycling, they send it off to a company in Indonesia who then dumps it in the ocean.

So it was always better to not separate the plastic for recycling, just send it to the dump.

> I remember growing up in the 90's and happily learning in school and on TV that it was my civic duty to recycle.

You probably learned the three R's, reduce, reuse and recycle, in that order. On the whole we've mostly forgotten about the first two and with plastics they're the only 2 that really apply. Before they were banned by the holier than though types I would at least re-use plastic shopping bags as rubbish bags, that was way less environmentally destructive than pretending to recycle the plastic packaging they were filled with.

There's more to recycling than plastic though, glass and cans can be recycled indefinitely.

>the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the result not of their practices but of individuals' inevitable failure to be conscientious

according to Seaspiracy, almost 50% of the plastic in the garbage patch is from the fishing industry.

> It should have been

it still should be

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