I can't tell if this is ignorant or ill-intended. The 'recycled' material from these markets is getting shipped to Southeast Asia and dumped in landfills as per the original link in this submission.
Ask yourself if what you say is real, then there would be no need for new plastic from crude oil since our market would be interely circular with recycled plastic.
Plastic recycling pelets have a very limited use and there are only a handful of countries were consumers care about it where manufacturers mix in some recycled pelets and claim the plastic is from (partially) recicled plastic.
Recycled plastic is greyish in coloration (you can't make it transparent) and far more brittle than 'new' plastic. Recycling plastic was a con all along to allow corporations to make a fortune on packaging cost savings.
- Plastic is cheap to produce but difficult to recycle. Create quotas for 'new' plastic and make packagers bid for plastic in a plastic market managed by plastic producers. Petro-chemical producers still make money with less volume manufactured, since packagers have to bid for new plastic, paying more for it. This also forces more recycling since it is more competitive in comparison than outbiding in a new plastic market.
- Ban single-use plastic except for medical/lab applications.
- Enforce return schemes for plastic and glass at consumer shops but payed for by packagers.
People will complain that prices go up but that should have been corrected a long time ago. There is no free lunch, you can't have near free cost packaging without some consequence, in this case we already have plastic in intra-uterine babies, I say the buck should stop here.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-2-summer/notes-here-t...
Plastic is the lightest, thinnest packaging material we have. Reducing its use may means trucks carrying less stuff that is heavier.
Though you could counter-act that with more local bottling plants so that transport is shorter. In other words, don't bottle the soda in George and ship it to New York or whatever, but actually have multiple local bottling/washing plants in New York itself.
It's always kind of strange how people how people never wonder how we got from a society where stuff got reused a million times to one where we don't.
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb176...
So might as well try something new and fix excessive plastic waste at a different point in the lifecycle.
So Coca-cola reaps all the benefits, while councils pay for all the cleanup. Being pragmatic here though, whoever is ultimately at fault doesn't matter, because the outcome is clear: councils are poorer, coca-cola is richer, and the earth is full of plastic. So do we wait for the sudden and unprecedented cooperation of consumers across the globe, or do we regulate plastic?
As for how to regulate, I would suggest that plastic recycling is paid for by the companies that produce the plastic, perhaps through levies per-kg of produced plastic that ultimately make it more costly to use than more environmentally friendly materials. This would help councils/countries afford recycling infrastructure for plastic that makes enough sense, and it would naturally be more economical to use less plastic. We need a way to set a "Tradeoff cost" at a community level, similar to how there are taxes on fuels for cars.
I really like this model, and it works over here.
Of course, you still need a working recycling chain, but at least it incentives individual people to properly bring their rubbish to the recycling places.
Collecting the waste is not so hard - today you have automated sorting lines that can separate plastic waste from other waste and some people are saying it's actually better than separating the waste during collection because maintaining separate plastic waste/other waste disposal infrastructures comes out as more costly and less ecological (2 specialized trucks instead of 1 general, etc).
This whole problem is about what's done with the collected waste after it leaves the garbage bins at stores or elsewhere.
Created in 2003, about 32 years after Oregon created the first bottle bill.
Which reminds me, I need to take the bin of cans to the local drop site.
The relative autonomy of US states often means that states can move very quickly to pass progressive laws, even though the US is well known for legislative friction at the federal level.