Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
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I worked in packaging for 20 years. A bottle CAN be recycled indefinitely… if it’s made from GLASS.
Source: I worked 8 years for a glass bottle manufacturer.The real key is local bottling where local production isn’t possible.
Ship vats of Coca-Cola syrup to the 200 largest cities (more or less) in North America and create local bottle circulation.
Spice it up with local bottle designs or recycling marks. Now you’ve got novelty sales, collector sales, eco-conscious sales, ‘support local’ sales…
I am so confused. Isn’t that the coca cola model? Each area has some coca cola bottling franchise that services them, and they already have regional differences.
As far as I know local bottlers have been a thing for a long time yes. I remember TV ads for soda with a tack on slogan at the end from the bottling company. “Bottled by the good guys at Kalil”
Or aluminum
Aluminum has a plastic liner
Which is effectively not there, by weight or area. Also, aluminium is the most efficiently recycleable material we know of.
Too bad most of those bottles got replaced with plastic completely disregarding the impact of the environment they are causing. Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon, the same can’t be said for oil.
Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon
Is now a bad time to point out that not only is sand not as an abundant resource as you think, but we’re actually running short of it?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a39880899/earth-is-running-out-of-sand/
https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-world-running-out-of-sand
Isn’t this specifically about sand for construction which needs to be coarse enough? For glass packaging you melt that stuff anyway, SiO₂ is SiO₂. Also I imagine the amount of sand needed for glass bottles would be way smaller than what construction industry uses, even less so if you recycle.
Specifically sand for construction and glass making. Not saying that glass bottles aren’t a better solution than plastic, just that the main resource needed is rarer than initially implied.
Those glass bottles used to cause an awful lot of horrific deaths and injuries during handling, so from a safety perspective, there is no desire at all to return to glass. Glass bottles are also much heavier than plastic, so have a commensurate environmental impact due to the increased consumption of fossil fuels for shipping as well. Fixing the problems with plastic was a big PR win and saved companies millions in law suits and shipping costs. They won’t go back to glass. The answer is probably re-usable plastic containers purchased by the customer and refilled at stores for the same price (or more) than when sold in disposable plastic packaging. Another PR win in the offing, no doubt.
IT would be awesome if you walked into a convenience store and they just had everything on tap. You bring in your own bottle and lunch container fill em up and walk out.
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics
IIRC, plastic is byproduct of oil being refined into gas. As long as there are gas vehicles and engines in general, we ain’t gonna get rid of plastic. It’s so cheap because is has to be produced.
I believe it’s more a case of most plastics being produced using a by-product of the oil refining process.
So the use of plastic is subsidising the oil and gas industry.
Flexible packaging for 10 years here … we recycle and reuse 100% of the scrap we make in house, even our nylon, PP, and EVOH.
Or aluminum cans! Those are very recyclable as well.
Better but not 100%. Glass is the only item 100%. Paper is next.
The sad thing is that we don’t even need 99.9% of this plastic in the first place. People were making disposable packaging, clothing, building materials etc out of non-toxic and biodegradable materials for most of history and it was fine. I seriously detest plastic and wish it was banned/not made unless for exceptional uses e.g replacement heart valves.
It feels inevitable that our descendents will eventually say “holy shit, you stored your FOOD in it?!”, after we discover we’ve been literally killing ourselves the whole time
This is our version of ancient Romans using lead based makeup
Or them using asbestos for napkins and tablecloths, or lead pipes, or mercury in household paint. The Romans loved to use toxic stuff.
I mean we pretty much know that micro and nanoplastic cause all sorts of various cancers, and especially leech into water, so like, those disposable spring water bottles are all just a helping gulp of liquid plastic into bodies who are desperately repairing cellular damage and inflammation caused by said plastic shards lodging themselves deep into every membrane.
But yes have you heard of our friend leaded gasoline, yet? C:
I grew up with our friend leaded gasoline. Please pardon my ever increasing dementia.
Descendants? On this planet?
In this economy?
Yup. Plastic contamination is absolutely insane already. A recent study found that each person ingests about a credit card sized amount of plastic every day. And it’s been fucking with our metabolism and fertility, and causing other long-term health issues for decades now.
We rightly talk about the long-term impact of tobacco and lead on the human body. But somehow the impact of plastic (and, unrelated, sugar) has been flying under the cultural radar for many years. Good to see it’s finally getting the long-overdue attention it deserves.
Last week I decided to count every time my body touched plastic or ingested something that had touched plastic. I gave up within a couple of hours because my internal monologue was constantly saying “touching plastic!”
That shit is everywhere. Sometimes it makes sense (e.g. technology). But it’s also in our clothing, stores our food, etc.
I wish there were better options for storing food and drinks in containers made from materials other than plastic (like, for example tin cans - but even they are often lined with some plastic). But there aren’t. At least not ones that wouldn’t cause the economy to get hit hard You go to a grocery store and almost everything is housed or carried in plastic to some degree. Would be nice to have a database that promoted products that don’t use plastic.
I would say that we as a society need to decide which path to take: the hard path of getting rid of most plastic products and packaging from our lives, or continuing down the current path. But realistically, it’s outside our control, at least for right now.
Credit card sized amount every week, not day. And the data that went into that claim isn’t great:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247
Any amount of mp we consume is still terrible of course
Yup I want corn and oil subsidies just gone… HFCS, polyester and microplastics are terrible for health.
That last part is driving me crazy with frustration. If I identify a health hazard in my life, I take reasonable precautions against it, but when the whole system is inundated with that same issue, its hard to feel like you’re aligned with “society”. Like you said, it’s literally in everything we eat, drink and do. I’ll continue to support the plastics industry as little as possible, but it still has a stranglehold on industry. I’ve heard some promising reports from India about new developments in more sustainable packaging, but nothing’s hit the mainstream yet.
Mmm microplastics. Delicious.
Really. For the vast majority of packaging, what the fuck was wrong with just using cardboard? Even if 99.99999999% of the stuff winds up in a landfill, at least cardboard is theoretically renewable and will biodegrade in less than a thousand lifetimes.
Cardboard and paper bags went out of style because of the “save the rainforest” narrative. Even though most paper products are made from trees specifically grown to be harvested for their wood.
That’s why we started using plastic bags at grocery stores, remember?
That was what they told us. The reason they actually did it was because they were giving us the bags and they cost a nickel. where plastic bags cost them 5 for a penny.
Hemp is very versatile and can be used to make similar paper products while growing at a much faster rate, which potentially makes it a good replacement. The association with marijuana is part of what prevented it from catching on though.
Mostly it was the paper and textile industries lobbying against cannabis so that the superior products that can be made with hemp were illegal and didn’t stand in the way of their infrastructure and market segment.
That alone probably fueled the drug war against it as much as the government using it to crack down on any minority they could illustrate as using it more often.
Their green washing BS lists that it has to be harvested more as a negative.
…like lumber doesnt take far more effort per harvest, as well as take longer to grow?
Besides timber the no.1 reason is agricultural land
So what about samples (amongst other parts of the entire process) for food-grade products from the manufacturer? I work at a corn syrup manufacturing plant, and there’s no way you can ship corn syrup in cardboard. You would get mold, easily.
I think it’d be very easy to use plastic when we actually need it, and other materials for everything else.
Unfortunately businesses and stockholders disagree.
Pretty much nothing biodegrades in a landfill though.
Then why do they have to deal with so much methane?
I want a 100% tariff on virgin plastics, and a shift of corn and oil subsidies to hemp.
I think about this sort of thing from time to time, and every time I come to the same conclusion that manufacturers of bulk goods need to take more responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. They’re getting a free ride with municipalities stuck footing the bill for recycling plastics, and have zero incentive to solve the problem.
Let’s say the city sent all the recyclables to some regional warehousing facility where they would get sorted by barcode according to manufacturer. Then the companies would be charged for storage and would have strong incentive to come collect their property before it really starts to pile up.
Initially, they will no doubt gripe about it, but in the long term, it may be a win-win in that if say Coca-Cola realizes it can get all its bottles back, it could switch to a more reusable design that could reduce bottling costs?
But that’s a planned economy and socialism /s
Yeah. Every time I try to envision some small change that would bring us closer to a utopian ideal, it invariably smacks of socialism. I just can’t help myself! lol
I’m old now. I was confused most of my life wondering why the world was the way it was, then I actually read Marx, and now it all makes sense.
I mean, in a lot of places outside the US, there are small pallets of bottles that, when emptied, get sent back to the bottler to be refilled.
I do remember a time before widespread recycling when you’d pay a small deposit on a drink and get it back when you returned the bottle to the store. Where I live, alcohol sales still follow that model to some extent.
That was the old school approach and I have no problem with it. But it largely disappeared as municipalities started up recycling programs. I guess it was reasoned that when you do it at a city-wide scale, you cast a broader net and divert more material from the landfill. But as this article mentions, recycling has proven to be a sketchy prospect. It loses money for most cities with exception to aluminum cans where the metal still has some resale value.
One way or another, it would be better if we can get back to more of a reuse approach as opposed to breaking everything down to recycle the raw materials. That just doesn’t seem to be working.
This used to be the case with glass bottles in England back in the 80s. Seemed to work well, certainly I and a lot of other kids used to return as many of those bottles as we could to supplement pocket money. These days all the bottles are plastic and there’s no returns policy.
I’m pretty sure coke and pepsi successfully lobbied to have the bottle/can deposit on pop/soda eliminated
Not everywhere. I have it on plastic coke bottles and also aluminium cans.
Right on! I’d guess you’re in Europe. I just meant to describe how the elimination of the deposit in Canada and the US happened. It was corporate motivated, not municipally motivated. Sorry, I should have been more specific
Indeed. I lived in Canada in the past, they were doing it for cans, but for bottles it was only glass bottles used in restaurants and bars.
Ugh. They need to be part of the solution and not the problem. But you’re probably right…
A better system is to require all grocery/food/packaging, customer facing retailers to record all sales and from which suppliers those products were bought.
Then charge the retailer the average cost of ‘recycling’ or ‘to the planet’, or another measure of cost.
This will increase costs on all products, but by design more on the costs of hard to recycle goods and packaging.
Charge retailers that daily, watch end to end, from supplier/producer to consumer, behaviour change and iterate accordingly.
Start off with an industry sector though, like grocery stores, most are bricks and mortar, and have high brand acknowledgement so can’t easily escape regulation. The key is to charge the location of sale, not the companies ‘HQ’.
It would be relatively easy to implement, as retailers already collect this info for inventory management.
But I fear it wouldn’t go far enough? What we really need to do is close the loop so that product packaging winds up back at the manufacturer for reuse. And everyone needs to be at the table to discuss how that’s going to work, as it is a significant technological and logistical challenge for both the private and public sectors.
Closed loops are a pretty steep expectation. I’m pretty sure (with no evidence to back me up) with the amount of importers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers in the supply chain for a product on a shelf, it would be a costly proposition to attempt closed loop.
More costly than using a system of levys to promote behavioural change. Which is the idea behind the system i’s suggesting in the previous comment.
Its about changing the system for the better to generate the fewest negative externalities possible. If a closed loop increases costs more than a system of levys, then everyone will be squeezed more than necessary to get the same result, making negative externalities, like black markets, fraud, more likely than they need be.
Cigarettes in Australia are a great example of this in action. There is a black market for Cigarettes here because they are so expensive from the retailers, but the barriers to widespread black market adoption are still perceived as too high for the greater majority of smokers. The result is a small black market, which will almost always exist for any product you can think of, but the government has tightened the screws on smokers in the public market to make it as uncomfortable process as possible for the sale and purchase of Cigarettes. Until the introduction of younger generations vaping, and the lack of younger generations similar experiences with Cigarettes ill effects, the policy position led to a hard disincentive that worked to decrease smoking rates. But, as always, time and creativity need a reaction that we are still trying to get right.
And like, when I bring it up people call me crazy.
as with anything that challenges the crappy status quo.
so frustrating
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this in 2004. They also concluded that paper and glass recycling were similarly worse that throwing it away. Glass because the energy required to grind, melt, and separate the raw material, and paper because the process uses toxic solvents and produces just as much waste as throwing it away.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly. That’s another myth that plastic producers push to prevent people reducing their plastic use.
I worked for a glass bottle manufacturer and using cullet (broken glass) lowers the melting point and saves a significant percentage of costs to heat the furnace. Before the lightweight single use bottles became the standard in the 80-90’s, bottles were thicker and heavier, made to be returned, washed and reused.
Yep. I’ve told people about that Bullshit episode so many times. I’ve even shown it to people. They don’t believe anyone would lie about it and since the episode is so old new tech has to have fixed the issue!
Maybe it’s energy intensive, but energy can be clean, especially now that renewable energy is starting to become the cheapest form of energy. You could even make up for the variance by only processing when there is an energy surplus.
If we use more nuclear to create electricity recycling becomes cleaner and cleaner
I think the takeaway is: everything is hopeless so our species should either go back to hunting and gathering or go extinct.
Nah, hunting and gathering is how we got ourselves into this mess. It’s a mentality that leads to fascism and hoarding of resources.
We need to try some things we haven’t before, like meeting the basic needs of every human, and being OK with being OK. Nobody needs a billionaire, and anyone seeking to consolidate that much wealth and power should be stripped of their lands and titles.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly.
Not seeing why not. I did help work on a place that did that. Could you explain what you mean?
best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.
Yeah but that CO2 is already up here. Why is it better to pull up more oil instead?
As for the incomplete combustion products we had scrubbers.
I’m in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.
Ok well that isn’t happening.
I have been in waste of all sorts for the bulk of my career. Deal with the world as it is not as I want it to be. So given that we do use plastic the question is what do we do with it. Recycling or burning it for fuel are possible answers. If/when it is pretty much banned then it won’t be a big deal.
Got to say I felt really good working on that project. I built the scrubber system, keeping all the nasty stuff out of the exhaust.
I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).
No worries. I would like to point out that plastic broken down still has uses. Example we have been using it in sewage plants for the past few years with polishing ponds. Basically increases the surface area and gives the bacteria a place to hide out when there is a die off. The rough texture of shredded plastic pieces has a high surface to volume ratio. Decreasing the time it takes to process more poop. Part of the many reasons why modern wastewater treatment plants don’t smell as bad as they used to.
Yeah if you want to know about wet scrubbers just ask. Basically imagine a smokestack with nozzles. A liquid rains down as the gas goes up. The liquid picks up stuff from the gas. Then the liquid is processed. Devil is with the details with this stuff but the concept is over a century old.
For that plant I worked on the plastic was heated up with waste heat from another plant (cogeneration) in a low oxygen environment producing syngas. The syngas is scrubbed and then burned for fuel. Long term the plan for places like that is to convert the gas into liquid fuel.
Now I agree we use way too much plastic I would however like to point out that the same process we used to burn it could be used for pretty much all C-H stuff. Paper, wood, food waste, etc. the vast majority of household waste. According to the EPA IF garbage plants are run well they have the least environmental impact. It is is a big if granted.
Basically give me a trillion dollars and garbage will be solved. You do have a trillion dollars right?
I’m definitely game for this I have been looking for hemp based clothing, but it is always so pricey.
I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.
I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!
I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!
I just want hemp to become commonplace once more and not some expensive niche item
I was thinking about the plastic problem the other day and how humans could go about simply banning plastics cold turkey. I was curious what that would look like.
As a “fun” experiment, go through your place of residence and identify every item made with plastic. Now imagine each item eradicated or reinvented to eliminate plastic.
The alternative is many of those products would just never be made. Which, for a good many of them, is overall a good thing.
I don’t disagree. I just found it interesting to consider how much crap we’ve made with plastic. It’s kind of horrifying.
I just buy glass bottles and then re-use them for kambutcha
Why couldn’t we switch back to glass as our primary container material? Wasn’t that always fully recyclable?
Apparently we’re running out of sand. That’s going to make the transition to glass harder. I’m not saying I don’t agree because I would definitely prefer glass than plastic.
For people that don’t want to read/don’t already know
It’s the types of sand, desert sand is useless
Sounds like someone needs to make a new glass processing method so we can use desert sand
Sorry but this comment is completely ignorant of the chemistry & manufacturing… you can make some shitty unusable glass with it, but unless you waste an unsustainable amount of resources to try to make the problems less apparent, a majority of desert sand is too low-silica to work. It’s a problem with the material, no new glass processing method will change that.
And if you do decide to use desert sand, it’s practically a logistics nightmare, especially considering you’ll likely have to be centered in one of the few deserts made of sand (most of which are in North/South-East Africa and the Middle East, but also Central Asia, Australia, some parts of the Americas). But even if you did it’s not sustainable or practical, and it most probably won’t be in the future, there’s a reason glass manufacturing plants smack dab in the middle of sandy deserts have to import their sand.
I wonder if we can “recycle” desert sand to have more of the properties that we’re looking for… It seems the biggest problem is it’s weathered in such a way that it doesn’t bond properly as an agregate like sand harvested from the water does
What if we just take all the sand in deserts and move it into the ocean?
Insert Patrick meme here
Apparently ocean sand is fine.
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Good luck shipping stuff in glass packaging. Very heavy, extremely fragile, big, expensive. Glass is only worth it on reusable stuff. We need to find a good material for “throwaway” stuff. Eco plastic made from stuff like bamboo are great starting points. They feel like plastic even mcdonalds is using this material for their throwaway spoons. And it can’t be that expensive or they wouldnt be using it for free spoons
PLA is made from beet juice and degrades in a few weeks I’ve recently learned
There might be a plastic that applies to, but it’s definitely not all PLA. PLA is the main material used for hobby 3d printing and I can’t say prints tend to degrade in weeks (or smell or beets)
It degrades in a few weeks in a heated industrial composter, and it doesn’t meaningfully degrade in a sensible amount of time in natural conditions. It has the potential to be less bad than other plastics, but anything that biodegrades in a similar way to food is going to go off at a similar rate to any food it’s containing, which is obviously bad for packaging.
This isn’t an excuse to not recycle. The problem is not the very idea of recycling, but that things aren’t made with it in mind. Everything should be designed for reuse, repair and recycling.
Always start with reduce.
If reduce makes harder to reuse, repair or recycle, then reduce could be a false economy.
Reduction in this case is bolstering reuse, repair, and recycling. By having a lower consumption rate overall, you will, automatically, have fewer resources that need to be reused, repaired, or recycled.
I’m good with that. Done properly, the less usage should translate to lower prices. Though part of the price right here is not currently on the spreadsheet. The environmental cost of end of life is not part of the upfront cost, right now anyway…
Sounds like we should just tow life outside of the environment. Worked for that boat.
True, but it doesn’t count as reduce then.
We have known that less than 2% of plastic has been recycled for years. This isn’t new news.
I remember them talking about how little actually gets recycled in the late 90s. My guess is everybody assumed things had gotten better.
We don’t even have the capacity to recycle paper products appropriately.
The bar is so low that that’s almost not tautological.
Not to excuse the inefficiency, but it’s still better than not recycling at all. I’m curious to know why recycling hasn’t been effective. One of my guesses is that the general public probably don’t care at all to segregate. I mean, how many times have we seen people throw compostable stuff into the recycling bin and vice versa? And not to mention we treat every recyclables as if they’re all the same and put them into one bin. Plastics could not be recycled with paper or cardboard! That being said, countries have different system so there is mismatch with recycling programs across the world. Where I live, we treat every recyclables the same, but in Portugal they properly segregate paper, cans and plastics into separate bins. I think the different systems only makes recycling overall inefficient.
TerraCycle dumping “recycling” items in poor countries with inadequate regulations/enforcement (article in French). Moreover, a insightful documentary available on CBC The Recycling Myth regarding all the recycling fraud many multinational companies engages in.
It is not surprising to see environmental fraud happening so overtly under our nose or in plain sight in front of our eyes when there is little to no repercussions for doing so (legal or otherwise). I would even go as far as to suggest it is currently financially extremely profitable for corporation (and people) to lie about all the greewashing they carry out.
Youtube: The Recycling Myth
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Figure out which ones lied. Then figure out the estimated cost of actually recovering and recycling plastics that weren’t recycled. Then take that number, add 20% for “processing fees” and charge it to the companies, split up by their market caps.
Those companies will then go bankrupt and with the money they tried to pay Uncle Sam, said Uncle can buyout the remainder of the companies that are actually doing something worthwhile and operate them as a public trust.
Oh, we know. NPR had a report a few years where they interviewed someone that helped spread the lies. But this country will never hold corporations accountable.
The ridiculous thing is they are doubling down on the lie, insisting that this time they will figure out a way to recycle plastic, so just keep buying it.
This is an application of ai that I don’t think people have caught onto yet… Doing the calculation. Everyone and their descendents who got rich screwing the environment and others will pay reparations and the few people who can stop the financial computer network from carrying it out won’t since everyone will want to find out what happens. Ai is capable of orchestrating this reckoning.
Can AI cite their sources and calculations? For something like this the companies and especially the people will demand hard data proving culpability. I didn’t think AI could do analysis like that.
Haven’t we always known this? I remember some CBC News station out trackers on recycling and they watched pretty well all of it wind up in land fills and China.
a lot of people still don’t know this.
i live in a small country in Asia and they love garbage here. you get a plastic cup and a plastic bag that has another plastic bag with a plastic ring so you can put it on your bike, and then you throw it in the street when you’re done. they have sex with garbage. they eat garbage and then they puke the garbage up and then they eat it again and then they fuck it. they put garbage directly into the sewer drains. it’s not just something that dick head kids are doing, it’s something that everyone is doing because it’s normal. they have no idea.
I really want the packaging industry to fuck all the way off with the use of nonbiodegradable materials. We need a 100% tariff on virgin plastics for the health and safety of everyone
I don’t think it’s so much that anyone lied about anything, it’s that people have ignored two really huge contributing factors to the entire recycling cycle. Remember the three R’s?
Reduce consumption. Reuse things that aren’t damaged. Recycle when it becomes unusable.
Plastic containers don’t need to be melted down and remade into anything; they can be cleaned and reused. But we just throw them away, or send them to be recycled immediately, and still consume more; completely ignoring the first two R’s.
All these containers could be, and maybe should be, going back to the manufacturer they came from to be washed and reused. And we consumers could try and consume less things that come in such packaging or containers since that’s the only way they will make fewer things in them, though that’s easier said than done.
Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. Another challenge: the material degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can generally only be reused once or twice.
The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.
Nope, they just lied. It wasn’t just that people weren’t re-using, people ARE reusing plastic products. But industry lied about the viability and cost to recycle the material.
At a 1956 industry conference, the Society of the Plastics Industry, a trade group, told producers to focus on “low cost, big volume” and “expendability” and to aim for materials to end up “in the garbage wagon”.
Then they pushed non-reusability.
An internal 1986 report from the trade association the Vinyl Institute noted that “recycling cannot be considered a permanent solid waste solution [to plastics], as it merely prolongs the time until an item is disposed of”.
Despite this knowledge, the Society of the Plastics Industry established the Plastics Recycling Foundation in 1984, bringing together petrochemical companies and bottlers, and launched a campaign focused on the sector’s commitment to recycling.
They’ve always known recycling to be a short term solution but hid that to get around the inevitable legislation against plastics.
Problem is that reducing on an individual level is difficult to impossible because I don’t control how things are given to me, i.e. takeout or how produce is packaged.
Agreed. Individual conservation will never have the impact legislation can. For an example look at reusable grocery bags. Only a small minority of people used them when it was optional. But when localities banned disposable bags everyone had to.
Recently though faux reported that banning plastic bags increased plastic waste because people are too lazy to keep track of these reusable bags. I’ve kept on top of things, but I seriously doubt others have.
Well that’s exactly the lie they sold. Reduce? Reuse? Absolutely. No question.
Recycle? If it makes sense. Should you recycle magazines? Sure, I’m sure it’s possible… But that glossy coating means you’d have to put it through a bunch of rounds of chemical baths or something to separate that plastic crap off. Same with cardboard - if it’s glossy, it’s probably not going to turn back into wood pulp, and if it’s oily it’d also ruin the batch (after a certain amount) so no pizza boxes either.
It’s like that for just about anything you want to recycle - you have to look at the cost. And I mean full cost - the energy cost, fossil fuel used to produce required chemicals, the river those chemicals end up eventually, the environmental opportunity cost of bothering with it vs creating it fresh, and finally the man hour and infrastructure costs
Even if we publicly funded it, it’s still an externality to the producer.
And that’s the lie. It’s like bailing out a cruise ship with a drinking cup… Theoretically it seems like “hey, if we can just move faster and we all do it, it could work!” But the numbers won’t work. You can’t scoop water up infinitely fast, and the geometry is going to limit how many people can increase the speed of bailing out water.
The only way this works is by plugging the holes or building enormous systems to offset the water coming in.
Reduce, reuse, recycle is a lie because it was never possible. Not for plastics - paper works pretty well, glass can work (but it’s a lot of energy if you don’t reuse it), metals work if the price is right.
But plastic barely works to create an inferior product (where only a portion of the material is recycled - you always have to add new plastic, sometimes only a few percent, sometimes more than half). You also have to sort it, ship it, wash the crap out of it, and deal with all the micro plastic-infused solvents. Because plastic sheds from heat, cold, UV light, mechanical pressure, and looking at it funny - every step of the process, you’re dusting the surroundings in micro plastics. Even rainwater is full of micro plastics. And generally, it all ends up washed into the nearest body of water and the soil
And what’s worse, is everything is coated in plastic if not made of it originally.
The only answer is to make companies stop wrapping everything in plastic… Yeah, it’s super convenient and cheap, but we could figure out better options.
People are so worried about the AI alignment problem, but the corporate alignment problem is a much bigger threat - we have to make them want it, because the campaign to “reduce, reuse, recycle” bought them 40 years of complacency
People are so worried about the AI alignment problem, but the corporate alignment problem is a much bigger threat
🤯
Plastic containers don’t need to be melted down and remade into anything; they can be cleaned and reused. But we just throw them away, or send them to be recycled immediately, and still consume more; completely ignoring the first two R’s.
Except a plastic bottle start leaking cancerous shit after a week or so iirc
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/08/health/bottled-water-nanoplastics-study-wellness/index.html
I’m going to be pedantic, but there is one R missing, the one with the most impact : Refuse.
So it’s Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
If you can, buy products that don’t have plastic in them at all. This is the biggest impact you can have as an individual.
That’s just reduce
At this point, it’s a bit philosophical. I like refuse because it is clear that if you can not buy thing, it is better than simply reducing that same thing.
Yet another instance of companies pushing the responsibility and onus onto private citizens. We pay for all the recycling infrastructure via taxes and waste fees. Yet more money thrown down the memory hole of greenwashing.
Can’t we just force heavy taxation for the amount of plastics in products? That would force producers to look at alternatives to plastic for packaging.
I am always in shock when I buy some product and it has layers and layers of thick plastic to give the impression of some premium product. And sometimes I don’t even have an alternative product to buy to avoid it since I only have 2 supermarkets in my area.
The difficult thing with this type of tax is that products will become more expensive. In most cases, manufacturers choose plastic because it is the cheapest option. If plastic becomes more expensive they may choose an alternative, but this will still result in a price increase.
This type of policy also tends to be regressive, i.e. it hurts people with lower income much more than wealthier people. This makes it unpopular.
