Plastic experts say recycling is a scam. Should we even do it anymore? | Hacker News Reader

Plastic experts say recycling is a scam. Should we even do it anymore?

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88 pointsTimothee116 comments

One of the big problems with plastic recycling is that people read "plastic recycling is a scam" but internalize "recycling is a scam". Some types of recycling are massively successful and efficient, like the recycling of vehicle lead acid batteries or post industrial steel recycling.

You don’t need to put metals in the recycling (at least not ferrous ones) because they pick those out of the trash anyway.

They just charge you extra to feel good about it.

> You don’t need to put metals in the recycling (at least not ferrous ones) because they pick those out of the trash anyway.

I've never seen that done at any of the various landfills I've been to. I wonder if perhaps some do that I'm not aware of, or if I misunderstood your meaning.

Some towns have thankfully realised that charging per-bin is silly and doesn't reflect their expenses well, so they now charge per-pickup, per-volume or per-weight, with recycling bins being generally much cheaper than mixed waste bins or even free.

Why do you think so?

Probably because its easy to do with a magnet so someone must be doing it already

Aluminum is not magnetic

Eddy Current Separators

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/magnetic-equipment-gu...

> (at least not ferrous ones)

I don’t think it is easy. Most of the other garbage will just tag along when you lift the metals. It would be different if the garbage was burned. Then you could just get the metals out of the ashes. But to have a clean incineration, the temperature will be high enough to evaporate some metals too.

Maybe if you ground all garbage to a powder it could work too. But that is another step that costs time and energy.

Or aluminum recycling, crazy efficient compared to making new aluminum.

Or glass, or paper, and almost all types of metal.

Also toner cartridges and pretty much anything else where "recycling" means putting back in the hands of the people who built it in the first place.

Unfortunately glass isn’t recycled here. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Probably more common in places that have glass production.

Same here. I've heard a litany of excuses, but the most common one bubbled up into a documentary (?) I saw a few years ago on YT claiming that it's more cost effective to manufacture new glass than to recycle old glass. Which just seems insane to me but is probably true (colored/dyed glass mixed in with clear? I don't know).

Our landfill had a recycling center for glass for a number of years, but it was essentially just one guy who was a landscaper/glass blower (or some such). He'd come about once a month to pick through what he wanted and the rest would get tossed. I guess he retired or moved, because they don't do that anymore...

Glass recycling is very efficient, but manufacturing new glass is just cheaper. So without a government subsidy, it's usually not worth it for the recycling plant.

I don't see the efficiency claim if we're talking about glass that's used just once

that why the comment was about "Glass recycling"

Glass is sand. Even for all the separating and such, most of it is "recycled" by using it for fill, because sand is plentiful.

The best thing for glass is reuse.

You would think sand is plentiful, but eg https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is....

I have been wondering about this in context of glass... With concrete and such applications you cannot have too smoot sand, but is it same for glass? As you are going to melt it anyway, it shouldn't matter if it is not usable in concrete...

From what I understand they want a mix of recycled and virgin glass to maximize the characteristics of the glass.

Once upon a time they used to reuse coke and beer bottles, not just recycle them.

I've heard (but am not sure) that the (energy) cost of transporting the empties + washing/sanitizing them may be more than making new ones. At least the dollar cost is higher, or they'd still do it (some local milk farms wash and reuse their jugs, so at some low level it's still efficient).

I wonder if that was true when Coke had licensees in every town handling the bottling?

I don’t think people appreciate what a franchising operation Coke is. Because they don’t have names.

The shorter the distances the easier to break even, which could probably be done with a bit of effort.

I wonder if the loss of glass had more to do with plastic ease of use (no bottle openers) than directly cost.

Heavy packaging definitely loses as miles travelled increases.

Years ago Method defended using thin walled, but non recyclable plastics for their products based on a bunch of factors, including miles traveled, product to packaging ratios, and the recovery percentage of plastic containers. Unlike aluminum and glass, only a fraction of the feedstock comes out of the process.

So if you have an HDPE recycling process that’s 25% effective, you could keep an equal amount of material out of the landfill by making a product with 3/4 the material of HDPE. Which they did (and more) with blister packs.

They list them as recyclable now, but <gestures at the thread> and I think they did the right thing at the time regardless.

Paper is not efficient to recycle as far as I know. I guess if you have a pure source of quality paper then sure but from what I gather it’s mostly trash. Was that not the big issue a few years ago in the Bay Area? China stopped accepting it.

Paper recycling was worth it when it was mostly newsprint. Now it's mostly packaging so is too contaminated.

I mean from like an energy perspective.

Glass and paper are not significantly more efficient to recycle than to manufacturer new stuff. Paper is like 2x more efficient to recycle. Glass is... somewhere around there I forget. In both cases you can recycle all of the stuff, but it costs comparable-ish energy. For paper it's sometimes a clear win because trees.

Aluminum is like 20x more efficient for energy use.

Recycling glass is ~30% more energy efficient than creating new glass https://www.palpa.fi/juomapakkausten-kierratys/eri-juomapakk...

I have no idea about glass industry economics, but 30% energy savings would seem significant for any industry.

Ok yea that makes sense. I had a vague memory it was less efficient than paper but still net better energy.

Still almost everything pales in comparison to 2000% on aluminum

glass recycling is way more inefficient than you think, granted, you don't need the sand to melt but you still need the same energy, so, if the glass bottles are used just once you gain nothing, ecologically

I am not so sure about this. Do you have any sources? I think I read that it's difficult due to the abundance of very different aluminium alloys.

You can get paid for scrap of various kinds, and by the amount they're willing to pay, you can roughly see how much it is "worth it".

Ignoring gold, platinum, and silver, copper comes in quite high, followed by aluminum and then at the bottom is steel and iron.

Most places will pay you over the CRV for aluminum cans, and they will usually also pay for bulk aluminum, more than they'd pay for steel or cast iron.

"Recycling aluminium consumes only 5% of the energy required for primary aluminium production, resulting in a 95% reduction in carbon emissions."

https://international-aluminium.org/new-iai-study-reveals-en...

I don’t know where you read that.

To quote wikipedia:

> Recycling scrap aluminium requires only 5% of the energy used to make new aluminium from the raw ore

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

Which cites this article from The Economist: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2007/06/07/the-price-of-vi...

Ok, one example (granted it's a bit niche):

"Since the demand for recycled aluminum continues to increase, the discarded aircraft provide a large source of valuable metal. However cost-effective recycling of aircraft alloys is complex because aircraft alloys are: (a) typically relatively high in alloying elements and (b) contain very low levels of impurities to optimize toughness and other performance characteristics."

https://www.totalmateria.com/page.aspx?ID=CheckArticle&site=...

Also

"The separation of scrap into specific aluminum alloy groups can be checked by Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) or color sorting, but economic and technological challenges limit the use of these processes (Capuzzi and Timelli 2018; Gaustad et al., 2012). All sorting methods offer less than 100 % efficiency. This leads to significant contamination of the aluminum, in particular with iron and copper"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...

Fascinating, thanks.

I can maybe shed some light, however I’m not 100% positive. And you very well might know all this:

My read here is that “aircraft grade” alloys, probably like 2000 and 7000 series, are relatively harder to recycle. They are less used and more expensive, I cba to look up stats on raw production estimates, if they exist publicly.

This is separate from recycled Aluminum being treated as a separate product(green aluminum), with effort made to bring it to parity with traditional Aluminum.[1]

Again I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of it comes down to Aluminum cans being the highest single use of Aluminum globally and being efficient to recycle and make with recycled aluminum.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S007964252...

Yes because we pay core charges on items or get back money for the metal.

I don’t think most people think recycling in general is a scam. What is a scam are most of the municipal/local efforts to recycle. Those are practically all scams and I wish we were more honest. Give me a little bin, take my glass and metals. The rest just throw in the dump.

Sorting your recycling is probably a scam. My understanding is that the aluminum content is already high enough to hire workers to sift through garbage. It's a terrible job but robots will do it soon.

Could you tell me why spending a modicum of effort to sort one's trash in order to save more work for other people in the pipeline is a scam? Until we get robots to do this, I mean.

it doesn't save work, sifting requires the same labor inputs for any fraction, a more dilute trash stream doesn't help.

Do you have any numbers on how big that problem is?

I'd say it's the other way round.

There's a powerful and vocal contingent in the USA/Silicon Valley/HN that hate all recycling as a matter of libertarian principle.

It's basically a sin against the gods of free markets for any government program to fix market externalities and worse to be successful and popular.

The only type of recycling they've had any real success in demonising is plastic, so they use that as a wedge to bad mouth the whole thing.

Very similar process, often with the same players, with climate change.

If we can, we should, but you probably want to consider most plastic wrappers as temporally displaced fossil fuel that will be burned for heat in a specialized kiln. The logo that designates plastic types should be changed to match local conditions, from the three circling arrows to a flame—with the same numbers. I believe that using those logos requires a license, but I doubt that it pays for the recycling of most of it. Most of it isn’t recycled anyway. You definitely want garbage collection and processing to be paid for by companies printing that logo. We definitely should include the cost of extracting and storing or processing carbon in there, too.

That might convince people to use paper bags or only certain types of plastic.

The logo with 3 arrows going around a triangle and a number inside is a resin identification number (RIN), and has no relation to the recycling symbol (3 arrows going around a triangle with nothing inside) other than the arrows. It's meant to be deliberately confusing, to trick people into buying things made with unrecyclable plastics. Generally only resins 1 & 2 can be economically recycled, the rest get burned.

Is there no value in merely separating and gathering this material, even if it's all dumped in a "plastics only" landfill, as opposed to one containing other types of trash?

Isn't keeping different types of waste sorted inherently useful in other ways?

I suspect you’re right. From my hometown’s local waste authority: After [we have] collected the waste from your bin, the purple dotted bag [with plastic waste] is sent on for collection and pressing before being transported to large sorting facilities in Northern Germany and other places in Europe. Here, 75% of the content in the purple dotted bag (figures from 2019) is recycled, and the remaining waste (often residual waste and food waste that has been incorrectly sorted) is utilized for energy.

And more detail: This is how household plastic is recycled: Collected plastic packaging is first finely sorted in Germany, before moving on to recyclers in the same country or elsewhere in Europe. We differentiate between the recycling of household plastic, which is the plastic you sort at home, and plastic packaging from businesses. - The plastic packaging you sort at home is collected by the municipality or an inter-municipal waste company. They press the plastic together into large bales. - Plastretur transports the plastic to a sorting facility. - At the sorting facility, incorrect sorting and contaminants are removed. This can include paper and metal, or other items that ended up in the wrong collection at your home. - Additionally, the plastic is sorted into different qualities, and non-recyclable packaging is removed. The sorting facilities classify the plastic into several plastic qualities such as PP, LDPE, HDPE, PET before it is transported to a recycling plant. - At the recycling plant, the plastic is washed. This process also removes labels and glue. - Then it is ground and melted into small beads, called pellets. Pellets are a raw material that can be used to make new products from recycled plastic.

> remaining waste is used for energy

This really is the key - if people weren't so scared of incinerators, the "landfill" problem would be basically solved.

I still don’t fully understand. Would there be unwanted gasses coming out? Could we not burn the specific plastics where it’s economically worth it for electric generation? I don’t know the full science so my assumptions might be wrong but I wonder how much worse it is compared to coal and natty gas plants?

Probably, but, separating is actually a really hard problem. People do not do as good of a job separating their own recycling as they think they do. Others don't care at all. MRFs are expensive due to maintenance, labor, and other operating costs, and if there's no cost recovered from the recycling there's little to fund their existence.

As a challenge: try to separate waxed cardboard food containers from polyethylene-coated cardboard food containers. They look almost identical. They feel quite similar. Nonetheless, the former is compostable, whereas the latter is not and also contains non-recyclable plastic. (Good luck getting the polyethylene off the cardboard. Maybe you could derive new polymer feedstock from the whole mess, but this seems no easier than turning compostable waste into plastic in general.)

I've toured our local MRF and was shocked at how good it was at robotic / magnetic separation. Incredibly fast AI trained 'pickers' pulling material off a belt (sorting by visually distinct plastic types, e.g. PET vs opaque plastics, paper, etc), combined with some human labor and magnetic extractors. Very high capture rates for all plastics except films - those remain hard to sort / grab. I was not expecting this level of performance...

Valuable considerations.

Seems like a perfect machine learning/robotics application, but probably not one that will receive funding if it's pitched with the objective of, "look now all of this problematic crap is in one place."

I don’t think separating the disgusting mess in mixed recycling is an ML/robotics problem. Neither robots nor human hands can turn food-splattered paper into clean recyclable paper. Nor can they turn plastic/paper composite materials into anything else. Or dirty plastic bags or dirty polystyrene foam or (yuck!) fluorinated HDPE.

Fair observations but, doesn't this assume that disposal and containment are truly our only options now and forever?

Even so, you think there would be no worthy efficiency gains for pure sorting or materials mining in using machines that can identify known objects effectively, and hands that will go where humans will not?

There are solutions that don’t involve reaching into the mess and sorting it.

Some places incinerate their waste for energy. If done well, pollution (except CO2) is minimal, and the outputs are energy and ash. Perhaps some day the ash could be processed to extract useful minerals.

More generally, if you imagine waste to be a clumpy soup of organic goo, assorted interesting elements and minerals, and polymers (which are technically organic goo but are sort of worthy of a different category), perhaps it could be treated as such and processes could be developed to economically extract useful things from it, kind of like how geological processes turn dead cells into oil.

But I see no fundamental reason that, say, old polyester needs to turn into new polyester as opposed to anything else. And keep in mind that, even if burnt to CO2 and ash, there are processes that use energy that turn CO2 into valuable chemical feedstock.

Much to consider here, thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I could read this report, or I could go and look at the EPA's original document on recycling that they're keying off of.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-11/documents/20...

I could phrase this as "never above 9.0%" or I could look at pg 6, Table 2. Materials Recycled and see:

           1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2005 2010 2015 2017 2018
  Plastics Neg. Neg. 0.3% 2.2% 5.8% 6.1% 8.0% 9.0% 8.5% 8.5%

That's not a bad trend. In fact, here's the standard business Excel fit chart that says in 2050 I expect that recycling will have reached 22%.

Simple Excel fit of dots: https://i.imgur.com/4txVyqr.png

If this was a business speak chart about market dominance, business folks would be happy. It's mostly second order upward. Little bit of a slowdown in the last 2 years, yet 0 to 9% of the market.

Candybars

Im old enough to remember foil and paper wrappers. Im old enough to remember wax paper.

It all comes in plastic now.

Get a bag and put every piece of plastic for your week in it. Bottles, wrappers... bring it all home. The ammount of it is obscene.

We have a separate service that we pay for to recycle our plastic, and do exactly that; separate out all plastic and put in these bags - and yes, agreed, the amount of plastic is sometimes unbelievable.

Last night I cooked 2 packets of fresh Udon noodles. Each packet contained 2 plastics bags of vacuum packed noodles, so in total I had 6 separate plastic bags to throw away, for a total of 200g of noodles.

Plastic is always at the center of these hot discussions, however, is there any reliable and practical replacement to it? Any new material that’s safe -glass is not even safe apparently with microplastics (1) and to the environment (2)-,cheap, and durable enough -forget about paper-based like straws?

(1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29803096/

(2) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic...

Is cost what prevents more things from being packaged in aluminum?

Aluminum isn’t transparent and can’t handle certain chemicals, but it’s not that expensive—if it’s recycled consistently.

It’s routinely replaced by steel for, say, cans because that ends up being cheaper (with thinner walls), but steel is also cheaply and effectively recycled. It also often has a thin plastic layer when holding acids (like Coca-Cola), so it’s not a complete replacement.

> Aluminum isn’t transparent

"aye, how quaint"

Aluminum also gets lined in plastic so...

Glass is the idea when we're talking about liquids.

Glass has a lot of good characteristics (clear, impervious to most contents), but is heavy , fragile, (both of which make transportation expensive) and limited recyclability.

Isn't it the case that aluminum, while easy to recycle, it's quite energy intensive to do so ?

If it's thrown in a landfill then that defaults into letting it decompose in some unknown way for thousands of years. If it's stored and we find a way to break down or reuse plastic, it's still around.

We do need to cut down on everything "disposable" though. The planet cycles are circles not lines, there is no "away", what you mistreat will come back to hurt you later, line cannot go up forever, no infinite growth on a finite planet. These are lessons the smartest guys in the room refuse to learn because their ego has convinced them that human ingenuity is superior to every single problem that human ingenuity causes.

The title is about recycling but the article is about the need to cut plastic production.

The bogeymen are "plastic production" and "companies." No names. No substantive changes suggested.

Toothless virtue signaling.

thinking about how this works, it just astounds me how clever and creative it is from the industry standpoint. capture a word, then redefine it to conform to an existing effort.

Modern recycling transfers plastic waste away from capitalisms best consumers (the west) and burdens it upon its least visible (the third world.) Its like a black hole for all the immediate problems of the indelible hell you've created. in electronics recycling has an added bonus for elites as it generates scavenging jobs for children and adults alike, further cementing their class status through subsistence poverty.

the cult of recycling will continue just as long it continues to ensure plastic detritus doesnt impinge upon elites, and this is evidenced by things like plastic bag bans which exist predominantly in affluent western cities. Once no one wanted to "recycle" the bags anymore, (or consumers couldnt be counted on to behave properly and accept "recycling") the bags were just banned or taxed.

perhaps the most damning impact to recycling in the 21st century has been Chinas realization that it is a garbage shipping scheme and promptly banning waste import from the west. That certainly sent "recyclers" scrambling for a new "partner" for a time.

the only way to stop "recycling" is to do something akin to that which Germany does: emburden the capitalist with their waste and allow shoppers to return the various detritus directly to them. we do this to a limited extent in the USA, forcing electronics stores and auto repair shops to accept waste oils, batteries, and electronics, but it pales in contrast to what some european countries force their profiteers to acquiesce.

Single use plastic bags were banned here.

Two things happened as a result - the plastic thickness was increased so they can call them reusable instead of single use, and stores started charging for them.

Instead of reducing plastic waste it had the opposite effect.

Of course it didn't have the opposite effect. It's now very much the norm (where I am) for people to bring these bags to the supermarket / grocery to pack their goods.

And to back up my claim: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/governme...

"Supermarket plastic bag charge has led to 98% drop in use in England, data shows"

I think something like this is really on people. It isn't really hard to use your same bag hundreds of times. It also isn't hard to just not use a bag (I regularly just wheel items out to the car, put them in a box I have there, then take the box inside).

If individuals can't be bothered with simple things like this, is there really any hope that any law will help?

> If individuals can't be bothered with simple things like this, is there really any hope that any law will help?

I personally think that the law is a waste of taxpayer resources. In the end, stores are still offering plastic bags.

> it had the opposite effect.

Are you saying that the annual total tonnage of plastic bags increased?

Not the gp, but I think they're referring to this: https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-02-12/califor...

Fascinating. Thanks

Related, lots of discussion last week:

Plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39387387

I would like to see other incentives on the other end.

Make consumer packaging rely less on plastics.

Put some effort into Material design.

We do have an island of plastic larger than France floating in the Pacific ocean.

Recycling is an industry psyop to convince the public that plastic can be consumed ethically and sustainably. Unless we ban disposable plastics altogether, the problem will only get worse. Plastic has only been around for 100 years; imagine just how bad things will be in 500.

They even designed their plastic type symbol to look like the recycle symbol, even though most plastics can't be recycled.

> The “chasing arrows” symbol we see on plastic containers and products does not necessarily mean the product is recyclable.

https://www.acmeplastics.com/content/your-guide-to-plastic-r...

When we have built entire civilizations that require orders of magnitude more burning of gasoline to get through a day, plastics are the least of our worries, IMHO.

If my fellow Americans were forced to lift and pour the 20 gallons of gasoline when they refill their tanks, they might start to realize the true source of the vast majority of their environmental damage.

(And as far as waste, tire microplastics are a far bigger concern than any plastic packaging waste.)

Hah just imagining having to help fill the jet fuel before ascending the stairs to the plane.

Same idea as slaughtering your own animals. Problem is that there is still a lot of other invisible uses from companies. Can't force Shell execs to bring paper towels to clean up an oil spill (well, maybe we can, but you get the point).

Then ban oil and cars, too. I'm deadly serious.

Friend, I am right there with you. Its a long political battle ahead of us...

"Deadly" is the operative word, as that would cause incalculable suffering and damage.

Cars do cause absolutely untold amounts of death and suffering. Something like 60-80 millions deaths and 2 billion injuries have been caused by cars.

It's one of the major causes of early death. Most of our fire departments' time in the US is spent dealing with the carnage and bodily mutilation caused by cars, and only a tiny fraction spent on actual fires.

That may well be true, and yet, getting rid of oil and cars would be much worse by many orders of magnitude.

You think getting rid of oil and gasoline cars would kill 6-8 billion people and injure all the rest?

Getting rid of oil and cars would be much more likely to lead to civilizational collapse than climate change in my opinion.

It's mind boggling to ponder a world without any plastic products though, isn't it? I work in ag irrigation, and the degree to which plastic has taken over irrigation implements in the last 20+ years is mind boggling. I sometimes wonder what it would mean for our company and industry in general if plastic suddenly became toxic.

If plastic becomes toxic, it won't _become toxic_, it will become recognized as toxic, which would mean that it's toxic right now, and while that's true for some plastics, it doesn't seem to be true for the majority of food-safe plastics in use.

I think it's more likely that there's some kind of subtle effect from the introduction of microplastics into the ecosystem that we haven't identified yet, but as of right now, there's no conclusive evidence that I'm aware of that microplastics are toxic, only that sufficient accumulation of them can impair biological function, just the same as any contaminant would.

Agree 99%, but as plastics break down there's a chance that they do become toxic.

For example, a chemical used in tires is extremely toxic to salmon, but only after breaking down a bit:

https://www.science.org/content/article/common-tire-chemical...

Oh wow, that's really interesting. I wasn't aware. Thank you!

After the stone, bronze and iron age, we are definitely in the plastic age now.

I imagine in 500 years there will be nanobots and engineered organisms that recycle plastic in the environment.

I call it bullshit. PET used in plastic bottles can easily be depolymerized or even used as fuel. I live in a poor ex-USSR republic, and plastic recycling is a popular business; it were a scam no one would do that, as government neither mandate nor sponsor recycling.

I think when people call it a scam they are referring to the idea that it is marketed as a way that plastic can be green and good for the environment because it can be recycled. It may be profitable to be used as fuel but it is not green.

Another thing in the article is richer countries with higher environmental regulations just export to poor countries where the pollution is less regulated. Just exporting the problem to you. I have been to Kyrgyzstan most their electric is hydroelectric but in general it seemed their environmental regulations were lacking especially in the villages they just had heaps of waste, in the past it would be mostly comparable but lots of single use plastic means the waste is permanent.

Yes agree. recycling won't make plastics green.

Bottles are one thing..

I just ate a package of crackers. Plastic. I ordered a product from amazon, retail packed in plastic and cardboard. I got an amp, the box liner, plastic. The amazon box, had plastic bubbles in it.

I'm willing to bet most oof that ends up in a land fill and not recycled here in the states.

Contains a lot of microplastic, too:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/plastic...

What country do you live in if you don’t mind me asking?

mind

REDUCE. REUSE. Recycle.

Plastic recycling isn't the only kind of recycling...

Sure, but it's pretty obvious that plastic experts would be talking about plastic recycling in particular.

Yes but I would guess plastic makes up the majority of items. Paper/cardboard too which is also a scam to recycle in most systems.

Perhaps in a MRF context, but there's all kinds of recycling going on that isn't MRF.

I read a Pocket story recently about cartels of cardboard thieves. Just the concept itself was wild.

Diversion and repurposing on an individual and industrial scale also happens with milk crates and especially with wooden pallets, and probably also with plastic pallets.

No doubt. I was mystified by the repurposing being so lucrative as to encourage full blown cartels.

I dread what other obsessive compulsive framework will replace it once it's gone to keep the consumer self inquisition busy. I vote for it staying.. The horror you know..

You can very easily define symbols that match what is on collection boxes. That’s not difficult: the current standard is a series of numbers with three chasing arrows. Obviously, you want to challenge the arrows because they were intentionally picked to look like the recycling logo, but if you need a complex system (and we don’t) numbers are fine.

A better system is to consign containers and have the collection machine do the sorting.

It's a favourite German pastime to drive to the Wertstoffhof (recycling centre) in your car to drop off the collected plastic for recycling. Now there are some bins where people can put some specific plastics like yoghurt cups (mostly cleaned by people, probably with a lot of hot water). Some are plastic foils with aluminium, styrofoam but most of it goes into the "mixed plastic" bins. There's all kind of stuff in it, some of it dirty. Who in their right mind would think that any of this mixed plastic stuff could be recycled?

Isn't it ironic that you are making a specific trip in a one ton metal box that burns gas in order to recycle plastic that can't realistically be recycled ?

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