Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.
It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.
It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here.
The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain".
The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive.
Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable.
The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.
If we boosted plastic price at point of sale by a recoverable amount, claimable when returning the container for recycling, we'd get higher participation.
Separately, we should also apply the same to the post-return lifecycle: company pays a premium for the material flow, then it rebated that premium upon proof of recycling.
tangentially--and I'm aware this sounds incredibly stupid, and I'm sure it is--but on the topic of geothermal hotspots, what is the downside of finding some lava/magma source deep, deep underground and just dumping rubbish in there? surely most of the fumes would just be absorbed before they reach the surface? is it just too expensive of an idea/has it been done/is it likely to have undesirable long term side-effects/do we simply not have safe access to such things
See prior comment about road to hell being paved with good intentions.
Take price as a proxy for resource / energy input and see that new plastic is also incredibly lite on inputs.
New plastic may have some off-gassing / contact contamination concerns though.
Last time I checked, energetically we’re better off using plastic over paper or recycled plastic, and burying the waste… if we could do that reliably, which we don’t seem to be able to.
One is "People don't like bags stuck in the branches of trees and clogging waterways in their parks". Lightweight plastic shopping bags are so thin that a light breeze can pick them up and loft them up into the air easily. They cost approximately nothing - <2 cents retail, significantly less in bulk. It is incredibly expensive by comparison to pay someone to remove them from tree branches and riparian zones - tens of dollars in wages, equipment, and liability insurance. This is a pragmatic reason why municipalities passed bag taxes or bans. Forcing people to use paper or heavier-weight plastic bags that don't blow in the wind, even if they're not in practice "reusable", solves this one. Taxing them 5 cents or 10 cents or 25 cents per bag nudges a high percentage away.
My family returned six cases of 15 bottles each to Costco, then found that the other brands at local stores were the same way. A couple of months later the bottles went back to normal. I still wonder if they switched back due to customer rejection of the new plastic, or if they found the new plastic was in some way leeching contaminants.
At some point there are so many bricks in the road, it's direction is so clear, that the intentions are not longer good. At best they are ignorant, but too often they are self serving malice sailing under the flag of ignorance.