The market for plastic recycling is such that it's often less expensive to just truck it to a landfill. That's what happens in many places, all your efforts to have separate bins for plastic and sorting your trash every week might well be a complete waste of time.
Do you think that having all plastics spread through a landfill is better than having them grouped even if residing the in the same landfill? I think sorting your trash is never lost time on a global scale. Anything done to make it easier for future generations to handle garbage should be done, even if it has no immediate benefit.
Is the theory that someone is paying them for the sorted, baled plastic, trucking it elsewhere and then putting it into a landfill?
Perception is 9/10s of the law.
... yet.
Do you think that in a wonderful future where we get some technical advancement to be able to deal with plastics effectively, will it be easier to deal with it when it's uniformly spread through the world's landfills, or when it's sorted and dumped in bulk?
<https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/17/climate/ask-nyt-climate-r...>
[I]f the [recycling] plant can find a buyer at a price that makes sense, the bundles will be shipped off to a recycling plant. Sometimes a local one, and sometimes one as far away as Africa or Southeast Asia. If they can’t, everything goes into a landfill or gets incinerated.
And even though my original comment is at zero, the industry specifically pushed recycling because by making people feel like they were helping, they would ignore the real problem.
<https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...>
Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true.
"If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment," Larry Thomas, former president of the Society of the Plastics Industry, known today as the Plastics Industry Association and one of the industry's most powerful trade groups in Washington, D.C., told NPR."
Burying the plastic is probably the better option.
<https://www.ft.com/content/901c78e6-b4d0-467c-ab87-6fc44c8a0...>
“The energy required to do reprocessing is higher than the energy required to make the [plastic] in the first place,” he said. To limit carbon emissions in line with the global warming goals of the Paris climate accord, it would be better to “bury the stuff”, according to Hallett.
I frankly think that an enterprise that can build robots able to sort landfills would make mint.
Buried plastic is largely inert. It is one of the least nasty things that is in a landfill.