Plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For those not aware, recycling aluminum is absolutely not a sham. It takes about 2x the energy to make new steel than to melt down old steel. For aluminum, that energy difference is 20x!!!
This is why people will actually pay you to recycle aluminum, because running electrolysis through bauxite ore to make new aluminum is incredibly energy expensive.
If people can wrap their head around the idea that landfills are not dumps and are instead very safe and borderline irrelevant, then the carbon emissions should clearly determine what one recycles.
Yeah... I'm not having an easy time with that one...
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/us/september-11-...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005946/
https://apnews.com/article/health-cancer-st-louis-missouri-1...
https://abc7ny.com/brookhaven-landfill-frank-p-long-intermed...
Quotes:
A proximity analysis, which modeled how many cancer cases could be explained by distance to Fresh Kills, found that none of the five cancer types had elevated rates closer to Fresh Kills between 1995 and 2004, although it did find that some thyroid and bladder cancer rates were higher near the former landfill site between 2005 and 2015. But the researchers still saw little evidence of a link to the landfill because they could not find any reasonable explanations for how residents would have come into contact with materials in the landfill that were known or suspected to cause bladder or thyroid cancers, especially since Fresh Kills closed.
“More plausible” explanations, the authors wrote, were higher screening rates for thyroid cancer and Staten Islanders’ higher smoking rates. Smoking is a known risk factor for bladder cancer.
For active landfills, yeah.
For decommissioned and capped-off landfills, nah, not if they've done it right. (And given that this is a regulated industry, it's very likely that they've done it right.)
In my experience in the American Southeast, Academy of Model Aeronautics airfields are often built on top of decommissioned landfills [0]... so I have spent a lot of time standing on and around these things. I've never noticed any odor, soft spots in the terrain [1] that is the cap, or any of most of the other weird things one might think of when one thinks "site of a former landfill".
[0] Why? Because the land is quite cheap, and a ~100 foot strip of tarmac, a few little structures (sun shelters and the like) and parking for a couple dozen cars isn't all that much weight.
[1] To be fair, the runway did have to be worked on every three, five years as the terrain under it settled. But bear in mind that we're talking about bumps in a runway for model aircraft, so the amount of settling was actually not very large.
But even if true, this is just making the argument that we should probably try to put them further away from people’s houses, which sure. I don’t want to live next to one even if there’s no risk at all so I agree.
I sort of am being paid to put my plastic in my recycling bin. My garbage company charges $47/quarter for a 35 gallon regular bin, and $22/quarter for a 64 gallon recycling bin.
It would require two regular bins to handle everything, which would be $94/quarter, which is more than the $69/quarter that one regular bin plus one recycling bin costs.
One would expect that the costs in that situation are likely to be more representative of the actual cost to dispose of the material, as the company can't obscure its economic reality with taxes.
The private collection incentives me to separate as much recycling as I can and provides nice big free bins for this.
If I understand correctly this is only economical because there is this whole system where all plastic soft drink bottles are made of PET, and so easily identifiable as PET and to get the refund you have to take it to a collection point where the only plastic entering the system are these bottles.
The big haulers here were all established parties that got to bid on these contracts and they played a very smart game but given the various downsides for society and the municipalities themselves in the longer term I can't rule it out either. It certainly doesn't make a whole pile of sense. One day glass was a valuable resource, the next you had to pay someone to get rid of it. Likewise for paper, compostables etc. This all happened in the 80's or so and recycling was the nominal driver. It outright ignored that we were already recycling. The big killer was to package everything in plastic and with plastic liners, even things that look like paper are often coated with plastic on the inside. So now we have two problems: the valuables are recycled and create a profit twice for the haulers and they charge real money for the ever increasing mountain of plastic.
People harp a lot on the straw ban, I get it, it is symbolic. But I would have gone much further: anything perishable that can be packaged in paper should be packaged in paper, and the paper industry should be incentivized to recycle as much as possible with the least energy as possible. Because right now recycling paper often gets skipped on account of the energy requirements (because we like our paper to be white). Instead it gets lumped in with the compostables or biomass and burned for electricity.
There is a ton of information on all this and it is obviously very variable from one locality to another but in the end resource extraction, energy use and leftover waste are the killers, those need to be curbed and far more drastically than we are doing right now. So much stuff is single use it is just terrible, and there are no real alternatives either. If you shop at a normal supermarket for a family of four at the end of the week you'll have a small mountain of packaging.
Individually wrapped candies in a plastic sleeve? Landfills will send you a invoice based on the volume that enters their site.
Phones designed to be replaced every two-years? You might be able to save money by making the original container a prepaid shipping box to cut back on sending out new ones for proper disposal.
Fruits and vegetables? That's bio-degradable and people will pay to have it in their soil. Make a deal with some local group to set up compost bins charging $1/scoop, and its like a built-in subsidy for farmers.
Have a novel solution that's 100% re-useable/recyclable? Enjoy the good times while entrepreneurs offer to pick that up for you to sell back to recyclers themselves.
EPA discovers that by "recycle" you meant "throw it in the ocean when no one's looking"? If you can't pivot quickly enough to cover both the new disposal fees and clean-up fines you'll be a good case-study for others who want to take shortcuts.
Sure, companies would absolutely pass the cost straight into the purchase price, but a company that wraps your sandwich in plastic and adds a $5 disposal markup won't last long when someone starts wrapping theirs in paper and only charging $1 more.
I know it's not that simple, but a man can dream, eh?
Also, I'm maybe a monster environmentally thinks utility needs to factor in. Straws are made of plastic because straws are useful and because plastic makes a very good straw. Paper makes a useless one, so they're pointless to even make. So many things use a lot more plastic than straws do, so I sincerely think straws should be the last to go after we've ended plastic water bottles, takeout clamshells, milk cartons, etc. Put all that crap in reusable glass or recyclable aluminum.
It's pretty easy for recycling centers to sort out most of the glass and metal from that stream and then as technology improves they can sort and recycle even more of the plastic.
As for the food waste, I just assumed it was mostly destroyed by the recycling process. The high temperatures for metal and glass recycling make that seem easy to me. Plastic would be harder, but I think that's also part of the reason plastic can only be recycled a couple of times (it's not "pure" after it's recycled.)
If it were economic to really recycle it, China wouldn't have stopped taking ours. And most of the rest of Asia followed suit, which is why municipalities are sheepishly hoarding it in warehouses now without a plan, or just admitting to themselves (if not their citizens) it's a sham and diverting most of those plastics we put in the blue bins straight to the landfill.
Biological Treatment: Organic waste, including food waste, is often separated either at the beginning of the process through manual sorting or through processes like anaerobic digestion. In some facilities, organic waste is processed separately to produce compost or biogas.
I have to take the cans down to the recycling center and throw them one by one into some machine and maybe they'll get recycled. Any compensation I might get is from the state, which is basically a dime for a can.
At that point I'm just going to throw them all in the trash, not worth my time nor fuel to drive down.
It's your dime, that you've paid. Included in the price. Same thing exists in Sweden for plastic, for example.
Usually such schemes are basically incentives for homeless (or poor) people to clean up streets paid from the can buyers pockets.
As far as I'm concerned, that ain't worth it; they can keep the dime and deal with the can in the trash bin, I couldn't care less.
Is it enough to slow aluminium on a conveyer or something?
The rotor contains powerful magnets and when it spins quickly it induces a magnetic field in nonferrous metals like aluminum, repelling them from the rotor so that they overshoot the "other waste" bin.
But anyway, what I've been told is that any kind of adulterants on metals aren't even a big deal because that will easily burn off when they melt them. Think about the Terminator in Terminator II. The leather jacket, and indeed The Chip were not a problem when he was lowered into the steel. :'(
The problem is that a pound of aluminum goes for about $0.45.
That does not come close for paying for a weekly curbside pickup service, which is what most individuals use for recycling.
Heck, they probably wouldn't even take an unsorted collection of "recyclables". The company I am looking at drops the price for unspecified "dirty" aluminum to $0.25 per pound.
The whole segment is so pro Capitalism that it is anti caring about the Earth at all. The message could have more easily been "We were fooled by Big Plastic for corporate profits".
No liability means that lying to improve returns is incentivized for the owners, and perfect information is needed to have free market.
I'm also unsure how libertarianism is anti-capitalist.
Are you conflating Corporatism and Capitalism?
US libertarians came from individualist anarchists, who basically thought that under capitalism, volontary exchange could not exist, as wage workers could be forced to work by power imbalance created by capitalism.
Even some neo classical liberals (liberalism is the ideology promoting free market) have played with the idea of natural monopolies created by land use. Hence you will see a lot of georgists amongst liberals who really thought about a perfect free market capitalism.
Finally, a good critique of free-market socialism (where every company is employee-owned, with real liability) is that interest groups will still form and lobby the government for advantages, distorting the free market, like the asset owners do currently (hence it cannot work in a representative democracy).
We do it all the time. Many facets of markets are not free. The pharmaceutical market is highly regulated, but boy is it capitalism.
A lot of the capital owning capitalists would prefer the markets to be less free in many ways. If I own a toll road, I really don't want a parallel toll road. This sounds like a ridiculous allowance in a capitalist system but look up the Ambassador Bridge. It is very much in that owner's interest for the market to not be free at all.
If you look at lobbying, many capitalists advocate for less free markets all the time. I'm not just talking about the capital owners either. Labor advocates push for less freedom in the markets consistently through wage floors and legal restrictions on employers.
It seems like there is an equilibrium point where a completely free (meaning every person for himself) devolves to the point where the lack of trust becomes too high of a transactional cost. Both food producers and food consumers benefit from regulations that don't allow you to sell sawdust disguised as flour just because you are able to convince someone that it will work the same.
When I was a kid, you'd be socially shamed for not recycling or questioning it as a solution.
Moving into college, people started feeling socially safe to quietly call out that the recycling program might be net-negative for the environment.
Slowly the conversation evolved in my circles to rewriting recycling's history as a "raising awareness" program. Where the goal was to bring awareness to this issue or that issue by socially pressuring a bunch of people into sorting and washing their rubbish.
Finally we are getting to the point where we can have an honest conversation about recycling.
But it's a real bummer because we've spent _decades_ misallocating capital into potentially worthless infrastructure that fails to meaningfully move the needle on the problem.
Would have been really cool if, instead of this whole social/political signaling thing we did, we instead spent that time and tax money developing processing facilities for compostable materials that are suitable for shipping/packaging and food storage.
Many current social/political ecomovements seem to be going through the same trajectory.
I do sometimes wonder what some of the educators would change in hindsight based on the overall failure of Reduce and Reuse to be the stronger messages over Recycle in the long term. I bet there is some frustration there because they tried.
Another thing that radically changed my mind about ocean plastics is that most all of it comes from a handful of rivers. The solution to ocean plastics isn't to eliminate or recycle all plastics, or even to filter it out of the oceans. Rather, we just have to to stop a small handful of countries from dumping garbage into their own rivers.
The article you linked specifically states that this was previously thought to be true, but is not.
It does however point out that per-capita ocean plastic polluters are not evenly geographically distributed.
Because the key bit of data there is that ocean-borne plastic is not primarily coming from beaches, or city storm run-off (at least in modernized areas) in an even distribution but is very obviously a product of local regulation (and in turn suggests that other measures - like foreign aid or imposing standards of behavior on local companies with foreign suppliers/subsidiaries would likely solve the problem).
The issue is no one's truly freed themselves from the "individual sacrifice" narrative of environmental remediation: the desire is to accuse people on an individual basis of ruining the world, and requiring all solutions to involve individual consequences for their "sins". There's much less enthusiasm for the reality, which is that other then some slight changes in tax allocation we might be able to just solve the entire problem and give a slightly improved standard of living anyway (i.e. people in wealthier cities generally like their waterways and beaches not to be clogged with trash).
Like "shouldn't have been pumped from the ground in the first place" -- what? (also ignoring that historically oil was discovered literally just coming up out of the ground on it's own).
* making their own durable packaging to buy back.
* figure out how to standardize package shapes and centralize collection/washing.
* Stop overpackaging and over marketing the food. A lot of foods don't need to come in a shiny colorful plastic packet.
This really is the fault of the corps. Recycling _could_ be practical, but corps want to throw it out and make more, because that's cheaper.
And if the article wants to talk about lying, it really needs to include the lying that US waste disposal corps are doing about what can go in their recycling bins. 3/4 of what current waste disposal says is recyclable goes straight to the landfill.
I do not believe any of the people that I saw generating social pressure around recycling in my childhood worked for plati-corps... But they did have their personal identity and social/political in-group signaling tightly coupled to being _perceived_ as caring about the environment.
No need for a historical lens though. The same dynamics are at play now.
The more frequently someone uses in-group and out-group signaling language to short-cut critical thinking in discourse, the more likely it is that they're perpetuating some form of "propaganda."
Perhaps we have to consider why single use plastic is appealing in the first place. The culture of use once and throw away might have started with plastic but didn't stop there.
I'm sure most of us here could find something unethical about their employer if we looked deep enough. That action might even be a product of globalization or the society and the only way for the corporation to exist is to do that unethical thing.
Its on the government to protect the people and the land. If plastic is an issue they should force the producers to do something about it. They would then need to increase the cost of the product, which could force people to use cheaper alternatives.
Corp is gonna corp.
The fact is there is an externality that exists to be taken advantage of, and it can try to be corrected in a few ways. Punishing the corp with taxes, regs etc is only one way
After acknowledging that recycling is a scam, you cannot introduce a statement like this without a lot of careful justification.
If everything previously in the article is true (which it is) it is not better to recycle plastic at home than to throw it away: it is approximately equivalent.
Your recycle bin ends up shipped somewhere halfway around the world, where most of goes into a landfill.
Firstly, there are too many plastics mixed together (and the article touches on that).
There is also the issue that even if you have waste that is made exactly of one kind of plastic, and it's the right one for some application, recycling works by chopping plastic into pieces. This chopping shortens the long-chain molecules that give the plastic some of its important qualities like impact strength. The resulting plastic is inferior to the original, even if pure and homogeneous.
If 85% of the plastic I deliver into my county's recycling program ends up in a landfill, I would consider that basically a sham.
If 15% of that plastic ends up in a landfill, that's not a sham (though there should be some openness about what is really going on).
I’d hate for this movement to push people to simply skip the recycling step.
The narrative that recycling plastics is never effective isn’t accurate and drives demand for more plastic manufacturing as stocks of recyclable plastics diminish.
Huh, wonder who started this rumor anyway?
A local landfill is dramatically better than shipping it on a giant freighter halfway around the world to be set on fire.
The best option seems to be to reject single use plastics as much as possible. Force companies to make changes if they want to make sales.
Knowing that this whole thing was a scam (which has been known for quite a while) should push governments to take action. Not only against a the plastics industry, but also to push companies to move way from single use plastics.
It's just a mess.
It's not even a rational obsession with zero human contact. A (true) chef is not expected to cook with gloves on. His hands are going to be all over your food while he's in the back. Chefs probably will taste something out of the pot to see if it's coming along ok. We know this (though perhaps try to avoid thinking about it). We'll eat nasty hotdogs at the ball game that have been handed to you down the bleachers by eight pairs of hands, but insist that our plastic cutlery come wrapped in further plastic.
Health depts are particularly obsessed with utensils too. The plastic is because of all of the hands that might be reaching into wherever they are if they're self-serve, if they're dropped, etc.
Gloves work to:
- not get your hands dirty - easily switch between a dirty state to a clean state (remove dirty glove) - prevent.. body contamination? How much is that a real concern though?
In other situations, food-borne illness mostly happens through cross contamination. Gloves would help there too if one changed them frequently, but people tend not to and it’s hard to make them do so at appropriate times. Some studies show that basically they are more likely to wash their hands when needed (likely because you feel that chicken juice on your hands) than change gloves. That’s why it’s debatable. People either wash their hands or change their gloves, and (excepting things like a cut on your fingers) whichever they do more is probably safer.
That certainly is not a slam dunk case for individually wrapping forks though. If the fork is in a plastic wrapper, you touch that and can still pick up the germs from it. It's some amount of reduction of spreading pathogens I am sure, how much I do not think we know. It is also, however, cheap and easy and not a really big hit to the environment, plastic wrappers on utensils probably don't make the top 1,000 sources of carbon emissions or landfill space.
The best solution (and you see this at places like stadiums now, and spreading to fast food) are the little machines with a hopper that dispense the utensils. You can get a sanitary supply with no individual wrapping. But they're not practical in situations like a hot dog vendor who is walking around passing stuff out. And you're still touching the little lever that 1,000 people before you did.
Nothing's perfect, it's all tradeoffs, but to a health department, they get no thanks from the public for sparing landfills from plastic wrappers, but they do get blamed whenever an outbreak happens, so you can expect them to err on the side of caution.
Besides some filthy cultures in the East, the majority of Eastern cultures have cleanliness even baked into their faith affecting everything from how they shower to how they pray to how they eat.
"Interviewer: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think about Western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea."
Much of the rest of the civilized world holds cleanliness in high(er) regard, but they're not germophobes.
Washing of hands wasn't a big thing before her.
Wrapping things up is a natural progression from constant hand washing.
Until someone put them in a plastic wrapper and marketed them as "sealed for your protection". They hit a nerve in the society, and soon people demanded them and they became the norm.
And just talking plastic waste in general, East Asia is far and away the biggest polluter.
Where they are a problem however is that they have a tendency to fly away and end up where you don't want them. In the ocean, in nature, littering the city, they are en eyesore, cause problem with some animals, and end up as microplastics everywhere.
Sturdier, paid-for bags may not result in less plastic being used, but it results in less litter, which is good. And yes, it works. Some people will continuously pay their 10 cents, grumble and throw away their bags, but most will do the smart thing and just reuse their bags.
And account for microplastics.
The paper, LDPE, non-woven PP and cotton bags should be reused at least 3, 4, 11 and 131 times respectively to ensure that they have lower global warming potential than conventional HDPE carrier bags that are not reused. The number of times each would have to be reused when different proportions of conventional (HDPE) carrier bags are reused are shown in the table below.They charge typically 10c for a single use bag, and 30c for a reusable bag[0] (which is much heavier plastic indeed). And people actually reuse the bags, or bring their own cloth bags, to the supermarket.
Additionally, single use plastics have been mostly banned and I can't recall seeing any (apart from straws, which were banned more recently) in the last 15 years. This was met with some grumbling early on, but people got used to it rather quickly.
[0] To give you an idea about how sturdy these 30c reusable bags are, I routinely use these to transport car parts (like brake disks & calipers, or suspension parts), fluids, power tools, or even lead batteries around.
I don’t think we were starting from 0
As for the plastic bag tax, in other counties which that has been introduced there has been a reduction in the use of new bags. Every culture is different though, so it might not work in CA. But what they’re doing is far from untested.
So if “bags for life”, as the heavier bags are often referred to, means fewer plastic bags are made and thus thrown away, then that’s still a net positive.
Because the time scales we are talking about are massive, what’s matters more is reuse.
If fact, that’s a key factor to consider regardless of the material you’re trying to conserve. Reuse is far more important than recycling.
there may be other problems, but there are at least those two advantages.
Everyone knows turtles eat straws. Through the nose.
https://ieep.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/IE-Plastic-Bag-Le...
And many more restaurants are trending torwards "flashier" packaging as part of "branding".
Unfortunately this system was dumped in favour of the usual single use "recyclable" bottles. I still lament their disappearance :( the current bottles (the same as everywhere else) are a huge step back for reuse.
Because at a large scale, you've got a couple of parameters I can think of:
1. the mean lifetime before a bottle fails / is removed from service
2. the failure mode of the bottle (i.e. if it shatters, does it go to landfill or do you end up with pieces in the environment?)
3. the amount of water and detergents needed to wash them properly, given the uncontrolled nature of the environment they come from, and the amount of power.
4. revalidating that the bottle is in fact clean - again - due to the uncontrolled nature of the environment they come from
5. the extra shipping involved in moving the bottles around for reuse.
It's easily possible they reusable bottles don't actually work out being lower resource use then single-use disposables with controlled disposal (i.e. stabilized landfill). Cleaning things when you don't know where they've been is fraught and difficult.
Basically it can easily be possible that reusing bottles you already have in your possession and wash yourself is better, it's not necessarily true that it works at a larger scale.
I think it's more the industry wanted to bring things in line with the rest of Europe, or that it was cheaper, rather than because it was better for the environment.
I’m willing to bet even glass is still difficult to recycle let alone plastic with hundreds of different types and colours.
So now that we know this can we start making changes now? I often wonder what happened to feeding seaweed to cows reduces their greenhouse gas impact from methane… I presume we never actually implement these findings and just carry on boiling ourselves alive.
> This includes feeding cows seaweed based additives, but one of the longest commercial trials failed to meet hoped-for methane cuts and led to the animals eating less food. ... “The commercial viability of those [food additives] means they are not something likely to be widely adopted by the industry.”
So yes, business as usual. Nothing has changed.
> A 2022 CSIRO report commissioned by MLA found the industry emitted almost two-thirds the volume of greenhouse gases in 2020 compared with a 2005 baseline. But it said the reported reductions have been driven by a decrease in land clearing and an increase in forest regrowth, as recorded by Australia’s national carbon accounting system. An analysis by the University of Queensland said the NCAS may be grossly under-reporting land clearing rates.
It's relatively worthless to recycle because it's about as energy intensive to do and sand is cheap.
"Sand shortages push up cost of jam jars and fracking" [1]. (2023)
"The problem with our dwindling sand reserves" [2]. (2023)
"Sand crisis looms as world population surges, U.N. warns" [3]. (2022)
"Why the world is running out of sand" [4]. (2019)
"The World is Running Out of Sand" [5]. (2017)
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/da751338-81a8-45c6-bf2e-acd979801...
[2] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/problem-our-dwin...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/sand-crisis-loo...
[4] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
[5] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-g...
Thats essentially recycling then isnt it?
Reduce Reuse Recycle in that order. Big plastic really wants you to ignore the first two.
I really miss this marketing. It made so much more sense than what is happening today.
Basic physics says otherwise. A commercial bottles washer sterilizes and cleans with water at about 140°F for about 15 minutes. While glass melts (depending on the type) between 2500°F and 3000°F. Then after that the newly formed glass needs to be kept in a annealing oven as it cools slowly from 1000°F to 600°F. the amount of energy needed is several orders of magnitude higher. also this doesn't mention the work needed to grind the glass to be melted, or the cleaning of the glass that still needs to be done so as not to introduce impurities to the glass your making.
The problem with so many of these programs is that you may subsidize an industry but that won't make it more efficient than physics allows for. Politicians love putting their names on expensive programs that sound great and won't prove to be a waste for decades. By then we're all left holding the bag after they've retired or died.
We need to stop demonising landfill. I love landfill - it is a focused area to put toxic waste.
There is a massive problem with society's obsession with keeping stuff out of landfill.
Tell me would you rather have waste plastic in the contained area of landfill, or would you rather than plastic was put into roads and leeched into land, air, food, water, people, ground, earth and air as cars and trucks grind it out of the roads.
It's not particularly lucrative, but it often makes sense for a landfill operator to do material separation, because the combination of selling the separated material and not using the landfill space makes financial sense.
Given that my county landfill is the beneficiary and will either need more tax money or close down and increase my disposal costs, separating the saleable stuff into a clean stream doesn't bother me too much.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/13/plastics-...
Who could possibly have comparably the same level of funding for a "hey this isn't doing what they say it's doing" awareness campaign? That took like twenty years to organize.
That's the central problem of any capitalist system; It by definition produces ready made organization of resources towards whatever a capital class wants, while making it inherently harder for the non-capital class to similarly put their technically significant resources towards their own goals. Capitalism inherently puts more control over large amounts of resources in the hands of those that prioritize individual rewards and have strong individual incentives against collective improvement. It inherently pressures the Capital class to be against collective improvement that has any cost on them, even extremely vague or distant costs, or hell, even just "costs" that are actually just personal subjective preferences, because they can afford that.
PET #1 is very recyclable in general. Not so sure about 2 or 5.
My biggest frustration is all the recycling labels smeared on things that aren't recyclable leading to everyone calling it a 'scam' when in fact some recycling of plastics (namely PET) is much better than the alternative (burning or landfill).
The earth is screaming at us to begin a steady, regulated phaseout from plastic, at least in disposable consumer products. The government will need to take action here, and it will happen faster if more consumers stop being so complacent about the problem.
It doesn't really seem that consumers as the end buyers of goods need to be convinced when we're mostly takers of goods.
I.e. An Exxon VP in 1994: "We are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results." [1]
1. https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/16/plastic-recycling-was...
Also see: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
It was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But it doesn't take much thought to realise which one had the highest economic incentives.
I would be happy if we started with just a deposit on every aluminum can all over. Pathetically few states in the US have them.
Neither can the government.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/plastic-wars/
Most of which conclude that recycling is a good economic and environmental option once you have reduced and re-used all that you can.
Getting the corps to pay for the externalities, as Extended Producer Responsibility laws do, is a much stronger strike against fossil fuel using/producing corporations than repeating their stale propaganda out of context.
Has anyone audited this by putting a few GPS-tracked plastic bottles into the recycling stream to see how many went to landfills or incinerators vs. being dumped in the ocean on the way to alleged recycling?
For example, if more people bought used goods instead of brand new ones, less goods would need be produced in first place, which would be great for humanity in general.
Anything reused or recycled will at some point become waste, but if it isn’t produced in the first place, that’s ideal. It obviously won’t work for everything, but it can work for a significant amount of things. The entirety of Temu and Shein would be a good start.
The same with lead
The same with Tobacco
They always know, and they will always value their profit over you and your making an informed decision.
Evidence for this? I can point to dozens of members of the public that I know who aren't making an effort or doing their best, and people in companies who are. It seems like you just have an axe to grind.
As in, a URL that you could post or something? Because if Redmond, WA came out and made it "public knowledge" that Waste Management was tossing our plastic straight into the landfill, someone's getting a spanking. Now, that's not to say that it doesn't happen, I'm just questioning that any municipality would be so upfront as to make public want many already suspect. But if that's actually the case, I'd love to read up.
They mostly talk about a recycling center that is producing low quality recyclables with other materials mixed in because they've had issues with their sorting machines, currently involving a lawsuit with the manufacturer.
The closest parallel is the use of crushed mixed glass as landfill cover, which is down-cycling, since they'd need to buy sand instead, which crushed glass is a substitute for.
So what are we going to do about this? Is recycling as a concept doomed to failure?
It damn well is if landfill and dumping it in the ocean was suitably charged/fined.
charge the sobs $100,000 per kilogram dumped in landfill or the ocean and recycling every gram will be economical.
https://www.uvagreenoffice.nl/post/against-wishcycling-amste...
So, it's not "all recycling is useless"?
Yes I felt bad typing that.
It’s a classic tragedy of the commons situation and our best tool is government regulation of producers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Fossil_f...