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Just to be aware if you're in the UK your recycling does get recycled so you should definitely take advantage of splitting your trash into recycling bins, in my council they recycle 60% (not buried or burned).

The rest is correct though and it will most likely be down-cycled, my personal strategy I have been using without going crazy is:

  - Home Compost bin (this gets rid of 90% of my waste and makes the next steps less gross)
  - split remaining waste according to my recycling program: cardboard, metals, glass, plastics, paper, e-waste
  - cardboard/paper about half goes into compost, rest should biodegrade so vaguely ignore and hope for the best
  - End of each week look at what it going into recycling (dog food containers, salad bags, sauce containers etc.) and try to find a zero-waste alternative or tell the company you are considering moving and if they have any plans to improve their packaging infrastructure

Support policy change, if we can tax plastics (or any material) at the right level to include its waste and energy cost there are plenty of businesses waiting to be economically viable such as; collecting e-waste/batteries and retrieving gold, copper, lithium. Bioplastics for wrapping food, sauce packets.

I am not an expert in this area, so would love other people to correct any mistakes, it's really hard to go zero-waste or think about the right way to solve this problem without getting overwhelmed.

Yep, this "plastics recycling is a lie" is an American-centric take stemming from one particular Greenpeace report. The depth of recycling varies a lot by country.

The problem still stands. Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, P&G, Tetrapak, etc. are overwhelmingly producing new plastic from petroleum.

Recycled plastic also gets brittle as you recycle it. Nothing in this Plastic story is anywhere near as 'circular' as it is with glass or metal recycling.

Especially the PET -Plastic from Bottles get's recycled in Germany because thanks to the deposit system you get it really really clean. And even the Discounters like Lidl sell Water and Softdrinks in PET-Bottles which are made of 100% recycled PET. If they don't do it over there, change the laws and force them

Even in Germany most Coca-Cola PET bottles will be from new plastic, or at best _partially_ from recycled pellets but not 100% recycled.

A bottle from 100% recycled PET pettles has a deep dark grey colour because they cannot perfectly control plastic colouring in recycling. So those pristine transparent bottles are 100% guaranteed not from recycled pettles.

It really is a con through and through. We need to ban single-use plastic, everything else is noise.

There is green and brown PET, for juices and beer.

Coca cola has been selling products in 100% recycled PET in Germany for about a year.

The major blocker at the moment is the lack of recycled PET to use.

So all the people undermining the work by telling folk not to bother recycling their bottles isn't really helpful, unless you are trying to support the fossil fuel industry.

https://www.packaging-360.com/en/current-topics/coca-cola-in...

> So all the people undermining the work by telling folk not to bother recycling their bottles isn't really helpful, unless you are trying to support the fossil fuel industry.

There is no 'work', plastic is cheap for the packager, expensive for our environment. The industry has setup a marketing compaign to divert attention away from all the externalized environmental costs of plastic.[0]

You are right that I want to undermine this effort because what I want is a full ban on single use-plastic outside medical/laboratory applications.

I highly recommend this PBS docu on the PR aspects around Plastic:

[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/

In the UK, most of our recycle bins are being recycled ... by shipping them off to poorer countries where it is pinky-promise recycled.

Local councils are often convinced that a lot is recycled, but it is mostly recycled on paper, not in practice.

Do you have a link to some stats on this? I've seen London's recycling set up and perhaps it's not covering 100% of everything, but it's an impressive and significant capability, so my perspective on matters isn't quite as dire as yours.

Obviously this might not stretch to other towns and cities.

Not specific to the UK, but here's a good source to read about plastic waste and export: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

Doesn't work if you live next to an AirBnB, all the recycling bins will contain random waste.

It's very hard to tell what happens to UK plastic recycling. A lot of gets shipped abroad for "recycling", where it is hard to check on what actually happens to it and little incentive for anyone to look into it too deeply.

It still seems like a good idea to keep separating plastic in recycling. At least some of it does get recycled, and having the plastic already available in a separate stream should make it easier to encourage additional programmes. However, the quoted numbers are probably very optimistic.

You need to be a bit careful about these figures. There can be a big difference between the percentage that is collected and given to a "recycling" company, and the percentage that is a tually recycled. Councils are usually bound to report the former, not the latter. So a council that got its residents to carefully separate the waste, collected it, and then gave it to a recycling company that put it all in a skip and tossed it in a landfill in Nigeria would still get a great recycling percentage.

Yes to clarify this is explicitly the percentage before being sent to "reprocessors", however here is a breakdown of Bristol council: https://www.bristol.gov.uk/residents/bins-and-recycling/what...

It's a shame that they do not link to the direct companies so you can trace the waste to completion but it looks like a good deal of it is not getting shipped outside of the UK.

I believe there are a couple of bills being proposed to also stop this practice completely, although I don't know how effective they will be.

The plastic doesn’t really end up getting recycled. It gets burned, dumped, or shipped overseas where mostly it gets burned or dumped. Plastic is mostly not economical to recycle. Recycled PET is more expensive than new PET and structurally inferior.

How many times have you seen a plastic product labeled "made with 60% recycled material"? Compare that to paper.

> So far, the entire concept if recycling plastic has been invented by Big Plastic to appease consumers that started being worried about it years ago. Plastic is barely being recycled right now because it's simply not economical despite government investment to make up for economical shortcomings.

This seems to be a popular myth, but the reality is a bit more complicated. In the EU around 40 percent of plastic waste is recycled (it tends to vary from year to year, sometimes it's a few percent more, sometimes less).

That is obviously not perfect. But it is also not nothing, and clearly does not support the idea that plastic is "barely being recycled".

The number is much lower in the US, but from that I wouldn't conclude that plastic recycling is "built on lies", but that the US needs better waste regulation.

Reducing plastic usage is generally a good goal, but it won't be reduced to zero, and we need better ways to handle the rest.

I see the recycle logo and the words “please recycle” on the flexible film plastic that holds my frozen vegetables.

Film plastic, is not recyclable except for a few cities in the US. It’s mostly garbage.

“Please recycle” is slapped onto every piece of packaging regardless of consumers ability to carry out the recommendation.

The other common misdirection is saying something can be recycled if you return it to a handful of collection centers. They’re banking on 99% of the users not planning to make an extra trip to keep the cost of those programs down.

Really? Here in Finland I see a lot of products in the supermarket that claim to be made out of "100% recycled plastic". I can't really compare volumes of plastic waste vs recycled plastic products, but it seems that at least some of the recycled material is put to use.

It's not true that most rich countries ship their plastic waste to poorer countries [0]:

Many people think that rich countries ship most of their plastic waste overseas. But is this really true?

The short answer is no: many countries export some of their waste, but they still handle most of it domestically.

Let’s take the example of the UK. In 2010, it generated an estimated 4.93 million tonnes of plastic waste.9 It exported 838,000 tonnes overseas.

That means it exported about 17% of its plastic waste. That’s a substantial fraction – nearly one-fifth of it.

0: https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-waste-trade

The obsession with plastic recycling is due to human irrationality. We are driven to conserve material resources over hard to imagine energy because matter is tangible. This is a fallacy. Plastic is made from oil, and recycling plastic requires more energy than making new one, therefore recycling plastic is the wasteful route. Just burn it all, problem solved.

Recycling not being economical betrays this reality. It's simply insanity to recycle, unfortunately in most places it's legally forced.

It also gets dumped directly into the ocean from the recycling transport or dual use fishing ships. Who then fish and bring fish home.