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Comment by kyleyeats | Hacker News Reader

How does recycling reduce plastic pollution? It's degrading and destroying the same plastic over and over. You're taking the high-quality plastic that would have sat in a landfill, making it into a lower-quality plastic and then sending it back out in the world. And then eventually... yep, the landfill, in the best-case scenario.

Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.

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"Recycling" is often a shorthand for any rubbish separation. In various countries now, plastic is separated at the municipality’s order so that it can then be burned utterly in an incinerator (plastic and metal waste are frequently separated together, so the metal can be recovered after burning). Burning prevents even microplastics.

Also, recycling can involve wholly reusing plastic containers several times, not breaking the plastic down to make new stuff. This has been done in e.g. the Nordic countries for decades now: soft-drink bottles are returned to the supermarket at a special machine (so you get a deposit back), then they are washed and refilled by the bottler.

> then they are washed and refilled by the bottler.

Source? I highly doubt they're washing and reusing plastic bottles.

My experience is a few years old and apparently this system has changed, see this Reddit discussion[0]. But 0.5L and 1.5L bottles in Finland used to be made from much thicker and more durable plastic than in most other EU countries so they could be washed. They were then stamped, and once a certain number of uses was reached, they were finally disposed of.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/w703w4/plastic_and...

A good point. Where’s the cost-benefit to use _more_ plastic to create more durable products, even at the cost of recyclability?

Right now I’m making a product that should last 10 years outdoors. I wanted to pick PET or HDPE for their high recyclability, but if it leads to a shorter product lifespan (and all the opportunities to drop out of the recycling stream), what’s the point? Our plan is use a more rugged plastic and take back old product ourselves to recycle, only because we have a willing injection molder.

ABS is one of the most commonly used plastics and very unrecyclable, but it might be more acceptable if the electronics in it were supported for more than 3 years.

In Germany they successfully refill PET containers: https://www.tomra.com/en/reverse-vending/media-center/featur...

Your source seems to suggest it's a deposit return scheme, not a bottle reuse scheme?

First sentence in the article:

>Germany has the world’s largest and highest-performing deposit return system (DRS, also known as a deposit return scheme)

later it says

>In a few years, the market share of refillable containers fell below this quota, and so a DRS for single-use containers was established in January 2003.

It’s both.

A lot of bottlers use reusable bottles, thick walled bottles (15ct deposit) that are sold in crates. For a lot of soft drinks and water they tend to be made from PET (because it’s lighter than Glass).

Don’t get me started on the German habit of buying water in crates rather than using perfectly fine tap water

Then you also have thin-walled PET bottles which are 25 ct deposit and one-use. Return rates are rather high because of the high deposit.

The crates are often a PITA to deal with because you need to return them to a shop that sells the same bottles (there are some standards, but some bottlers think a non-standard bottle is a USP). Whereas the 25ct bottles must be taken back from any store that sells 25ct bottles themselves.

I think they stopped the washing-kind of recycling in favour of just recycling the material in the early 2000s.

If you reuse the same plastic multiple times, doesn't that reduce the total amount of plastic needed to produce the same number of goods, thus reducing plastic pollution?

Recycling is complicated, because only certain polymers can be recycled, then it has to be separated from contaminants, transported, sorted and re-shipped to re-use facilities (often in China). A lot of improvements are needed for this to be both lucrative and effective [0]. Then there's the microplastics that still spread across the globe.

[0] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2022/gc/d2gc0...

> Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.

I don't follow your logic. Say you consume 10 units of plastic per year; if 5 of them are still good to be recycled, and 5 end up in the landfill as degraded "low-quality plastic" (whatever that means), you net landfill contribution is 5/yr.

Why would be sending 10 units/yr of "high-quality plastic" be any better?

In practice, the issue is economic; it's cheaper to produce new plastic than to fix the entire recycling supply-chain.

Until we have a carbon tax over plastic manufacturers that equalizes the recycling costs, it'll be hard to create systemic change just based on consumers' consciousness.

Plastic eating bacterium seems to be the only proper way of disposal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis

> How does recycling reduce plastic pollution?

So the solution is to make more plastic? If we're not reducing the amount of plastic we're using, we can at least make less, by reusing the plastic we've already created. Take plastic conduits, they are mostly made from recycled windows, but still last a heck of a long time, that is going to be the better option than making all new plastic for them. We also reuse plastic bottles all the time, 87% of soft drink bottles are reused and made into new bottles (in Denmark), so we'd need to create a lot more plastic overall to compensate if they where not reused.

On a lower level, having to recycle your plastic at home makes you painfully aware how much plastic you drag into your home. Ideally that would mean that you "buy" more, but mostly you don't have any control over that. Everything is packaged in way more layers than strictly needed. The amount of plastic we have to sort on a daily basis is insane. It has made me look for products that are packaged in less plastic, but it's an uphill battle.

In practice, plastic recycling can be worse than other solutions, like incineration and well managed landfills.

That's when plastic is sent to "recycling" centers overseas, which not only burns fossil fuel getting it there, but may end up in nature instead of being recycled when no one is looking. And by overseas, I mean countries like Indonesia, China used to be one of them but they are now taking the environment a bit more seriously and are starting to refuse to greenwash western trash.

Plastic recycling can make sense in a limited way, but it shouldn't hamper other efforts. The most important being avoiding dumping in in nature.

And remember that plastic is carbon. Burying it where it doesn't degrade is carbon neutral (for oil based plastics) or carbon negative (for bioplastics).

> How does recycling reduce plastic pollution? It's degrading and destroying the same plastic over and over. You're taking the high-quality plastic that would have sat in a landfill, making it into a lower-quality plastic and then sending it back out in the world. And then eventually... yep, the landfill, in the best-case scenario.

> Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.

Recycling was/is a scam

https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/the-passionate-eye/recyclin...

The idea that recycling exists allows guilt-free production and consumption of more plastics even if those are not actually ever recycled.

Just burn it.

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