Metal and paper recycling is super useful.

But yes, plastic recycling is a massive lie that probably does quite a bit more harm/waste than it would be just to throw it in the landfill

This is wrong, please stop spreading this misinformation.

It probably differs from country to country, but in Germany, for example, between 38-48% of plastic is recycled (source). Sure, that‘s far from all of it, but still far, far better than nothing. Falsely claiming that recycling is mostly a scam and, by that, implying that it doesn‘t make sense to try to recycle you trash, is a horrible idea and only makes the situation worse.

Are you sure that's still the case? I know china stopped accepting it ages ago - that's why most recycling just goes to domestic landfill now.

My area has recycling presort. So we have two bins that get picked up by the trucks. One garbage, one recycling. They dump them into the same hole on the truck. They drive the truck into the same building. The only thing the comes out of the building are loaded train cars. They all look the same. So all the neighbors presort their trash. And the trash company mixes them back together. Thanks trash company!

Basic economics dictates that recycling plastic isn't profitable otherwise industry would be doing it, itself. –That doesn't make it a scam. It's more like bad marketing.

Some of it will be truly recycled like with hdpe. Some will be used more conscientiously by being sent for plasma gasification. Lots of it will still get sent to the landfill, but that's better then sending all of it. Something rarely mentioned is that most plastics become less stable each time they're melted down, making them increasingly difficult to recycle.

It's believed that ~75% of all Aluminium that has ever been produced is still in use because it's economically more viable to recycle old aluminum than refine new. Alumium refinement is a highly energy intensive process.

Single stream recycling is a scam. Multi stream is much better. I recycle my paper and metals separately from glass and plastics for this reason. Wish there was an easy way to recycle glass too, but the collection networks aren't as widespread as the other two.

People are like "but the plastic bottle is free and easy", and I'm like that's because all those costs are paid for later, by everyone. It's really frustrating but common short sightedness.

No one should be allowed to product something without a plan for disposing of it safely and without environmental cost. I'm willing to suffer the inconvenience of carrying a reusable bag if it means less environmental destruction.

IIRC, that's actually how it was set up to begin with, way back when we used glass bottles for Coke. Big companies manipulated us consumers into thinking we were being lazy for not taking care of recycling ourselves and that's how we got to this mess today.

If the companies try and make the consumer eat the cost, then the companies who sell their products in cardboard packaging instead of plastic will be able to sell it for cheaper and potentially steal business from the others. There are plenty of products sold in plastic which do not need to be.

You can literally just put a tax on new plastic bottles vs recycled plastic bottles and the issue solves itself, the issue with recycling is that it's not economically viable.

The iSheep are down voting you. 😆

Too in love with their gadgets to take a joke.

I’m actually not too sure about that. I am currently using an older iPhone (and I really dislike Apple, it’s just that the stupid device just does not stop working) and from an environmental perspective, throwing that away would surely be worse than continuing to use it, right?

This is the answer. The best way to deal with the plastic problem is to stop producing it. The three R's are in the order they are for a reason. Recycling is the last thing to try.

One of the big issues with recycling plastics is that plastic has a very specific chemical makeup that gives it the properties it requires, and one major way to mess up that composition is heat. So, even if you can perfectly sort plastics into their respective types, simply heating them up to re-cast into pellets or something else can affect their properties to a state that they're not usable anymore. Add on top the fact that you will not be able to perfectly sort plastics by composition so you will always end up with a significant amount of impurity makes recycling very difficult.

Yeah, usually these companies just end up storing it all in a warehouse or a field until they go bankrupt, then the people behind that company start another company doing the same. And yeah, they promise they're working on technology to do the actual future recycling, but it never pans out.

I don't see any of those things reducing microplastics in the environment nor plastic being dumped in the rivers and ocean. The motivation behind recycling has very little to do with climate change.

Could just stop running one cruise ship for like 15 minutes.

Am I wrong I thinking that the CO2 emission from plastics is missing the point a bit. The issue in my mind is that the plastics remain in nature for a very long time with unknown health risks to us and the ecosystem.

When comparing a plastic bag vs a paper bag for shopping I hear the argument that making the paper bag has a lot more co2 emissions tied to it. But if I throw it in the bin it will be mulch before the end of the month.

The recycle bin? You mean the other landfill bin, right?

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