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> FWIW, I'm under the impression (while not being an expert), that plastics actually have pretty good recyclability and just suffer an "image problem" for reasons unrelated to the actual physical properties of the material

That’s what big oil managed to dupe policy makers with in the first place, the promise of recyclability. By now it should be apperant for anybody that it was just a big lie [1,2]

1: https://time.com/6173859/plastic-recycling-big-oil-damage/

2: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Well, the PBS article, first of all, is extremely poorly written. How can you write that plastic is "indestructible" and that it "breaks down" into microplastics that enter our bodies, in the same sentence, and not spot the contradiction.

Also, it actually says "All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive." Later down in the article: "Recycling plastic is 'costly,' it [the report] says, and sorting it, the report concludes, is 'infeasible.'"

So, it does sound to me like there's an important distinction here where recycling plastics (or, at least, disposing of it responsibly even when that's costly) is possible, it's just not happening.

Now, my own perspective: I live in Austria and Germany, where governments have been doing collections of plastic trash separately from residual household waste since the 90s, and are asking households to pay steep prices for disposing of residual waste, but not for disposing of plastic. When I lived in Bavaria, disposal of plastics worked through recycling centers, where people had to separate their plastic waste into half a dozen containers for different kinds of plastics under the watchful eyes of employees educating consumers on what goes where, and doing that kind of separation was the only way you could dispose of plastic at all, without paying the very steep price (effectively a fine), for disposing of it through residual household waste. -- There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria, usually no more than 10 minutes' drive from where you live, even if you live in a rural area. And they are packed on a Saturday. Nobody can tell me that people aren't using them.

I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill. They'd have to make sure to keep it a secret, because people would rightly be angry if they knew this, and they'd have to pay for it through back channels of sorts. This kind of scandal, while it seems possible, hasn't actually broken yet, to the best of my knowledge, over the course of the several decades that this practice has been ongoing an in any of the governments that have been doing this, which are many.

So, my working assumption until this particular scandal actually breaks, is that alarmism coming from environmentalists in the U.S. is really about poor waste-disposal habits on the part of the American consumer, and not some kind of conspiracy by big oil that governments are in on, to make us believe that plastic is anything other than the devil.

> Well, the PBS article, first of all, is extremely poorly written. How can you write that plastic is "indestructible" and that it "breaks down" into microplastics that enter our bodies, in the same sentence, and not spot the contradiction.

Where is the contradiction? It's breaks down in smaller parts of plastic, but still remains being plastic. It won't transform into something else, like oil, coal, or food for plants. It's still the same, just a bit smaller.

> There are a lot of recycling centers in Bavaria

Collected plastics in Germany are usually not recycled, they are burned or shipped to other countries, often under the pretext of recycling.

> I'm having a hard time imagining that the government would ask households to go to all that trouble and then just send it to landfill.

Governments demand much bullshit to pamper the citizen. And often it's not even the fault of the government's original idea, it's just that things evolve somehow in a poor way along the way. The corrupt forces break down any attempt until it becomes twisted enough to not be useful anymore in the original aim.

> Collected plastics in Germany are usually not recycled, [...]

...well, I use the term "recycle" very loosely. If it's disposed of responsibly, then fair enough. That presumably includes burning, as long as you do it in a way where you don't just blow the toxines into the atmosphere, and, presumably, wherever you generate heat, you can at least get some electricity out of it.

It just seems to me like the PBS article is strawmaning the pro-plastic argument by making it look like the only way you can have plastic at all, is if you're cool with it ending up in landfill.

The logic seems to be this: Plastic is extremely cheap to manufacture from primary resources, therefore recycled plastic could never compete in the marketplace with newly-made plastic, therefore there's no demand for used plastic as a resource in making recycled plastic, therefore used plastic will end up in landfill. Compare that to textile which has a much larger economic footprint and costs more to produce while being more durable. The previous argument about the primary market crippling the secondary market doesn't hold for textile. After all, second-hand clothing stores are a thing, and probably are a force for good.

But people mistakenly take away the message "textiles are good, plastics are bad". The economy is starting to reflect that consumer sentiment, and you're seeing plastics replaced by textiles in lots of scenarios to reach the "green consumer". Is that a net-positive, environmentally speaking? Probably not. If the break even is at 130 uses of a cotton tote bag, and assuming one shopping trip per week, we'd have to, on average, see nearly 3-year-old tote bags being used for them to make sense. I don't think that's what I'm seeing around me, I'm seeing mostly brand-new tote bags and/or people sporting a different one every day of the week because they have dozens at home.

What I'm also seeing: "Green" consumers are mostly just "rich folk", and their greenness doesn't stop them from engaging in their "rich folk" behaviours. They are buying more stuff, and replacing it more frequently, plus they are paying higher prices to have the stuff they buy be made from more durable materials, because durability gives a material an environmentally-friendly image while low cost gives materials a "damaging for the environment" image.

There is a very simple solution to this dilemma: Dispose of plastic responsibly despite the cost. It's not like nothing could ever get done in the world if free market incentives didn't force them to get done. Covid shutdowns got done. Some things are just a matter of principle. Make this a matter of principle. Pay for what it truly costs to dispose of this stuff out of your own pocket. If that means that plastic is still more economical for you to use for certain applications than alternatives, then by all means keep using plastic.

https://www.giiresearch.com/report/bon1238015-germany-plasti...

61% of the plastic waste collected for recycling in Germany is incinerated.

A lot is also exported to Asian countries where we pretend they are recycling it but they are probably not. This was in the news all over Europe back in 2019 when China stopped allowing imports of waste and all the "recycling" programs went into crisis mode. Germany now exports its waste to Malaysia instead.

Okay, that's an interesting data point that I genuinely didn't know about; thanks for posting.

But my original argument still debunks PBS's claim that sorting and free market economics is somehow the problem.

I still feel like I'm not personally at fault in my role as a consumer if I use plastic and take it to the recycling center assuming them to deal in good faith.

I had to look up the numbers for Germany but they're around the same around the world, sometimes worse.

I live in Japan which also boasts a very high high recycling rate, but the vast majority of the plastic just gets incinerated. Here whenever it comes up in the news, they claim that since different types of waste needs to be burnt at different temperatures, it's still worth it since it makes the incineration (which is used to generate heat or electricity) more efficient.

is really about poor waste-disposal habits on the part of the American consumer

To put this into perspective and link it back to the original article: the Japanese also have very highly organised waste sorting.

I think plastics don't necessarily have good recyclability, but why is this even needed? Just bury or burn it.

pollution and pollution

If they can bury nuclear waste, a bit of plastic can't be too bad. Just make the tiniest effort to bury it somewhere suitable, and burn it properly.

We produce multiple orders of magnitude more plastic than nuclear waste.

(As an aside, what does "burn it properly" entail? Gasifying before combustion? Even that is not exactly "clean".)

Not really and not really.

PE and PP, the most widely used plastics in disposable applications, are essentially highly refined oil (more like a wax) and burn cleaner than coal.

I hate when that study comes up. There's a lot wrong with it. See: https://medium.com/@parkpoomkomet/breaking-down-the-danish-s...

And funnily enough, I see people shopping with reusable poly bags more often than cotton totes. There's one manufacturer that supplies Whole Foods and a lot of other grocery stores, and they're pretty solid.

Are there any plastic recycling success stories? For example, the PET in plastic bottles can't be recycled into new bottles. The best case is that it can be used in carpet, and probably not very nice carpet that the first world would buy.

I've used my reusable grocery bags for over ten years. They have gotten well over 130 uses.

According to [1], about 15% of recycled PET bottles were used to make new bottles, and those aren't necessarily food/drink bottles.

I suspect the quality of collected bottles is a significant factor. Here in Denmark bottles collected as part of the deposit scheme can be recycled into new food containers, but other waste generally cannot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling

I have plastic bags that weren't ever advertised as "reusable", from over 2 decades ago, but are indeed very reusable. They made them thicker and stronger back then, but unfortunately that was wasted by so many choosing not to reuse them.