The sad thing is, only types 1 & 2 plastics are recyclable in any real fashion, and sometimes not even then.
That means types 3 through 7 are better disposed of in the trash, where at least they’ll be sealed into a landfill instead of being shipped overseas to end up somewhere far less environmentally secure.
These types are the numbers inside the recycling symbol. Many things are mixed and matched - a plastic bottle might be a type 1 (recyclable), yet its screw-on cap is typically a type 5 (largely non-recyclable). Always try to find the recycling symbol and dispose of anything not a type 1 or 2 in the trash.
Treating waste water? Water treatment plants cost so much that they will never compete with dumping raw sewage into the river!
Which is why my local water treatment plant built a brand new pipe so they can dump directly into the river rather than the local nature reserve.
I’m so glad we privatised that…
Being an old man this really gets me. I love the internet and the way computers today but there is a whole lot that worked fine before plastics were so common. Almost nothing in the grocery store had plastic and everything was pretty much as convenient as nowadays. Sure you had to pay a deposit on the glass bottles but you got it back when you returned them.
If I had to choose glass or plastic, I am always choosing glass. Glass is such a good material. It is infinitely recyclable, the bottles can be reused for several years, and if they are buried they don’t release microplastics.
That’s still the way it works in Denmark, but with plastic bottles too. Something like 98% of all bottles are recycled.
I wonder how much the oil industry subsidies are responsible for making recycled plastic more expensive than the new one…
The good news is that global warming (I prefer to call it Anthropogenic Runaway Global Heating because of the acronym) is going to completely fuck us all anyway, to the extent that plastic in the environment isn’t going to matter by comparison. At least oil turned into plastic and buried isn’t oil turned into CO2.
The two problems have a decent amount of overlap though. For example, I recently learned that car tyres are a huge contributor to microplastic pollution. This means that improving public transport infrastructure will reduce CO2 emissions and microplastic pollution.
But we still have microplastics in our brains, which does warrant some concern I think.
Sadly that is the problem. YOU did not think, the microplastics in your brain did.
Hey, maybe all the plastic will lead to such significant fertility issues, populations will crater, and ARGH won’t even matter anymore!
And this is how capitalism eats itself. Nothing can be done without a market incentive, including not suffocating our planet to death.
Not to absolve capitalism, but it’s pretty easy to add market incentives to at least slightly address climate change. The concept of “externalities” has been around for a while, where something has a net social impact outside of its sale. It’s normally solved with taxes and levies.
The real issue seems to be nobody havong the appetite to even attempt the most basic solutions to the problem, mainly thanks to lobbying.
It ain’t capitalism, it’s the stupid fucking consumers. If a product, already plastic wrapped 3 times before they touch it, has a tiny hole, “Oh no, that one has a hole. I want another one.” Hell, anything imperfect gets tossed. My dumpster at work is packed full of plastic because assholes won’t take anything even slightly unperfect.
It’s the idiots buying single, shrink wrapped potatoes. It’s the idiots who think a Keurig cup is an ecological disaster, while every other drink they buy wastes 4-5x as much. How about the idiots buying kitchen containers while they toss the, often better, container their food came in?
When I was young, it was the idiot hippies whining about paper bags, like we were chopping down old-growth forests instead of making them from lumber waste (which is sustainable). Congrats assholes, you won, now we’re buried in plastic bags and choking turtles to death.
Until people stop buying so much new shit, reject plastic containers (as much as feasible) and start paying a premium for biodegradable packaging, we’re sunk. Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation.
Well, i think it’s definitely the “big evil corpos” fault. But that doesn’t make your rant wrong either. Just, consumers never want to be told they are part of the problem. Corpos are shit and all but if consumers wouldn’t buy shit while there is an alternative, they wouldn’t continue making it. Advertising is a big problem there as well, and people, consciously or not, being influenced at all times…
It is capitalism tho. Yes, us dummies enable it, but it is capitalism that currently gives the power to misinform the public and suppress the spread of truth/accurate research to a few rich humans.
I also want those Karens to be ok buying a piece of fruit that isnt in 7 layers of plastic, but to pretend that most of the environmental diaster we face isnt caused by corprate need for profit at any cost is wild.
Or, better yet, we could force less waste via legislation
it’s amazing you recognise the better solution is legislation yet endlessly rant for consumers (dupped by the industry in this very post) to fix the problem
I just wanted to buy some kiwis at the store yesterday. The only option they had was 4 packs inside of a plastic shell container. They have their own natural container- fucking skin. What the fuck?
Japan can be really weird about this as well. They have fish markets with fish sitting in the open on ice, where they sometimes put a label directly on the fish. And then you sometimes see stores with single bananas in a plastic bag
deleted by creator
How to get politicians to change views:
Plastic causes ed and shrinkage
They’ll blame woman for being too slutty and fucking everyone BUT THEM.
Unfortunately they’ll just claim not praying to god enough and the existence of trans people causes ED and shrinkage…
Thats crazy we all know trans people do the opposite for that lot.
there have been several articles exposing plastic recycling as green washing. unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
i saw a chart somewhere showing less than 1% of plastic in use today is recycled but I can’t find it now
Sad that NPR is not considered “mainstream” these days. Maybe Joe Rogan will post something to Facebook about it?
NPR is definitely mainstream
I think the word you’re looking for is “corporate” or “for-profit”. Thats what they’re not.
fwiw I agree, but it doesn’t appear to be considered mainstream by the guy I was replying to.
ha. i was wrong. NPR has 44 million weekly listeners. that probably qualifies as mainstream media.
I thought npr had 10 times fewer listeners than that. (fyi NPR is the only radioi listen to)
https://blog.marketenginuity.com/by-the-numbers-who-is-actually-listening-to-public-radio
I thought npr had 10 times fewer listeners
If you want to be depressed, Joe Rogan has 10 times that for single episodes.
Was it ever? It seems substantially more popular now than it used to be 20 years ago, with them getting in on the ground floor of the podcast game and all.
unfortunately they never make it to mainstream media
Sounds like this “mainstream media” is not doing its job. This might have some kinds of implications for the current state of affairs in the USA. Can’t put my finger on exactly what though.
The price stuff can change through taxation that makes new plastic more expensive than recycled plastic.
As we all know, taxation is super popular and has never been controversial, ever.
At the very least flaskepant has worked great for like a century here in Norway. Always kind of surprising when other countries don’t have it.
Have we considered calling it a tariff instead of a tax? Tariffs on all new plastic. It might work.
Yes… plastic recycling can work, in theory, but the financial incentives are not naturally inclined to be in a way that recycling is feasible, since externalities encompassing the damage that plastic production has to our world are not accounted for in its price. (Caveat: the products that can be made from recycling are physically unable to be perfectly like the previous products they came from)
Like the cost burden of tobacco use being put on both users and producers, plastic must be dealt with the same way in terms of taxation levies so that plastic alternatives and plastic recycling are competitive compared to new plastic from oil by-products.
Most plastic can’t be recycled into something usable. Plastic degrades quite a bit with each recycling, leaving a bunch of microplastics behind (same thing with “biodegradable” plastic). It would be better to tax it enough (or ban it) to make it not used in certain applications.
Should’ve made the producers responsible for collecting and processing all plastics they produce. It that makes certain products economically non viable, than that’s on them to innovate better processes.
I hope that one day drilling oil has been banned, and CCS becomes mandatory. If you want hydrocarbons in order to manufacture chemicals and plastics, you can pull them from the air. There’s enough for everyone.
Carbon capture (more specifically direct air capture) is not a viable option due to the energy requirements and the low concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is largely promoted by fossil fuel companies for the same reason that recycling is: “let us keep doing what we’re doing because there’s some magical way to undo the damage, we just need a few more years of research”.
However, plants do the same thing and already exist. Trees in particular have shown some promise for being able to be a precursor for many polymers. This would at least mean that any plant matter used for this did pull CO2 out of the atmosphere in the last few years (so relatively neutral compared to the other options), whereas fossil fuels are releasing carbon that was removed from the atmosphere millions of years ago.
EDIT: TLDR, oil drilling should be banned or severely limited, but DAC is not a viable option and is only relevant because oil companies keep pumping money into it. Biomass is potentially an ok feedstock for plastics (but not for fuel).
Well, what if we used renewable energy to run a DAC process? That would require lots of solar and wind power, but we’re going to need a lot of that anyway to get permanently rid of fossil fuels.
As you pointed out, the low concentratiions are a serious issue for any process, but maybe plants will do a better job our current machines can. Either way, once you have that carbon, we would really need put it back where it came from. The way I see it, slowing down global warming is a step in the right direction and becoming carbon neutral is another step. However, what we really need is a complete ban on all fossil fuels and an efficient way to reduce the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.
Also, I have fairly negative view on CCU, since it doesn’t really solve the problem. CCS on the other hand seems like a better option. If you do it with plants and store the carbon as biochar, I’m all for it. If you want to do it with electricity and chemistry, I’m ok with that too, as long as it gets the job done.
The problem with using wind and solar is that you’d need a lot of it due to the energy requirements. While both should be used extensively, there comes a point where the resources required (these would likely use precious metal catalysts) to build the CCS plants and all the power infrastructure for it and waste produced makes it the obvious choice to just use trees.
If you look at how trees function, it is an incredibly complex process with some rather extreme conditions which are difficult to replicate with machines. If someone does manage to get it done efficiently then that’s great (though I think this is unlikely). But I don’t want it to become like recycling did: an excuse for companies to do whatever they want. The original expression was “reduce, reuse, recycle” with recycling being the last resort, but now we never hear about the first two because they get in the way of obscene profit.
We have bottle deposit in some states in the u.s. Some do it better than others though, grew up in Michigan and there any place that sold bottles had to be able to return them and a lot of the grocery stores had the machines. Moved to California and it seems like none of the stores are set up for it and the cashier will often turn you to a recycling center.
Oregon was the same way. You had to go to certain stores that had a deposit and it was slow going.
Right now it looks like paper and metal recycling is still good as far as I can read in two minutes. If someone has a correction let me know.
They also both have the advantage of being things that will naturally degrade over time if left outside instead of just sticking around forever
Correct. Paper (PS: or at least brown cardboard), glass and alu will always be great candidates for recycling.
Aluminum is the poster child for recycling, really. It takes more energy to extract it from the ore than it is to recycle it.
Former aluminum process engineer: This^
I was under the impression that the chemicals involved in recycling paper products, combined with the fact that virgin paper is almost entirely sourced from managed, quick-growing tree farms, make paper recycling also undesirable?
Have heard similar things. And it’s also true that timber farming is a (very marginal) form of carbon drawdown, assuming the wood products are not burned. But then in theory recycling could allow some of that land to return to nature, which better in all ways. It’s a systems problem.
The chemical issue is presumably bleaching for white paper. But thick brown cardboard is basically just degraded wood fiber so that at least must be pretty efficient to downcycle into toilet paper.
Update: there’s also another chemical issue in de-inking, maybe that’s what you were referring to. Personally I don’t bother recycling my tiny amounts of paper waste, for these reasons. Thick cardboard must be a win though.
Yeah same and I hate when people just say well might as “well not recycle at all then” :/ that kind of defeatism doesn’t help either
Yup! Those things are easy (comparatively) to recycle because they’re single material items, so the process is:
- clean
- break down / melt
- rebuild
“Plastic” is thought of as a single material, but even vegetable packaging will be made of around 5-10 different polymers, so for it to be valuable, you need to break it down back to those original polymers.
It’s not a issue with recycling as a whole, its specific to plastic as a material.
That’s just not true. I make flexible packaging and we use thousands of pounds of post industrial resin (made from scrap material produced in house) and post consumer resin (made from used packaging.) They’re all coextruded; frequently made up of 10+ different types of polyethylenes, polyamides, and ethylene-vinyl alcohol.
I don’t think “not true” is fair- I have a soure if you’d like to hear it from someone more authorative than some random internet person (unfortunately I think it might be behind a paywall)[0]
Either way, that’s cool! I’m surprised you can build flexible packaging from that, but I’d be really, really surprised if you can use something that crude to fit the other niches of plastic like building technology, clothing, etc.
[0] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2025/04/23/are-microplastics-harming-your-health
Really annoyed to have believed in plastic recycling even into my thirties. Being an idiot is such a burden sometimes.
Ignorance is only bliss if you never find out. Rookie mistake.
It hasn’t been my experience tbh… Being this bad at being dumb is basically what I’ve got instead of smarts
I wrote a school report on the plastic garbage patches (pacific, indian, north atlantic, south pacific) when I was still in my twenties. Maybe it was a coincident, but I had a real big depression around that time, so maybe ignorance would’ve been preferable.
The biggest issue seems to be around a lake of thinking. Recycling used plastics into more plastic is certainly energetically infeasible, and letting plastics escape to contaminate the environment is also unacceptable. However plastic can be recycled, or perhaps reused, into other things, notably as a partial replacement for aggregate in concrete. This process is low energy, doesn’t require sorting the plastic, and actually enhances the thermal and noise insulation properties of the concrete, whilst also reducing it’s overall weight. There are undoubtedly other things a stable, non-biodegradable, waterproof and hardwearing substance could be used for given some though.
The more I see plastic being integrated into construction, the more I worry we’re just postponing the inevitable. Concrete, stone and steel and basically reusable or recyclable and low impact on the environment when dumped. Plastic on the other hand slowly degrades into microplastics and seeps into waterways. Sometimes we forget that buildings don’t last forever.
That’s a fair concern, but, as you say, concrete is recyclable, and I would expect (though I admit I haven’t looked for studies) that it still would be when it has some amount of plastic aggregate. If the plastic breaks down in the concrete, the microplastics should be trapped, and will be reincorporated when the concrete is reused.
Nothing is going to be a perfect solution to plastic, we need to find alternatives to its use, but in the interim it seems sensible to find effective ways to reuse it rather than just dumping it and hoping for the best.
Maybe the best solution was to trap it in our bodies all along! /jk
Putting it in concrete just delays the inevitable.
It does, but it will also bind a lot of the micro plastic pieces into the concrete matrix, which, I think (and, again, as I said, I haven’t actually gone looking for any research on this), would keep them from entering the environment. If the concrete is then recycled, typically by crushing and using as aggregate, it would further trap the particles. It’s not a perfect solution, but I don’t think there is a perfect solution to plastics in general, we just have to find less harmful alternatives.
Best solution imo is burning it with a filter after use. Gasification will happen anyway but this way at least it doesn’t damage ecosystems.
Probably designed by a nuclear engineer
Recycling rates are low, but I wouldn’t quite call it a myth. There’s a lot of materials that get lumped together as ‘plastic’, that each have to be handled differently.
Some are relatively non-toxic and easily recycled. More can be, but aren’t profitable without incentives. Some are very toxic, and recycling those are difficult. Then there’s a lot of rarer types that make it hard to collect and sort. There’s also mixed materials, where it’s hard to separate the plastic to recycle.
Generally everyone should be minimizing plastics, but check how they’re handled locally so you know what’s recylable.
It seems there’s been a flip. The myth is now that plastic is not recycled and it’s all been a lie which is the actual lie.
The information around what types of plastics are easily recycled has never been a secret.
There is this weird mindset where people, often children are given a simplified explanation of things and then feel they were lied to when they find out their is nuance.
The entire world of information works this way. If the nuance was included from the start no one would learn anything because they would be bogged down in details. Every topic is a Wikipedia like rabbit hole with no bottom. It’s what we have specialization in society.
The issues with plastic are not in its recycling. It’s that is breaks down into what are essentially forever chemicals. This is the dilemma.
Producing less plastic because it’s not recyclable is bad messaging.
Producing less plastic because it creates a substance that will last for eons is the problem. We’ve known about this property for decades but the repercussions of it have become more pronounced.
We need to stop making more plastic and work out how to chemically dissessemble the plastics already created without creating a worse output.
In some places there’s really no recycling. For example, islands where recycling would mean shipping plastics to the mainland. They just burn it instead - if you’re lucky, for producing heating or electricity.
Sure but there is danger is telling people to not bother recycling. Even a location as you described since it could become possible in the future and it’s actually better for it to be shipped off than buried. Keeping plastic out of the environment is not a waste of fuel.
The focus should be a return to glass bottles that are reused. This was still a thing into the 90’s in my area.
Yes, recycling is always better.
I really can’t wrap my head around this… (https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/project-earth-frugalpac-sustainable-wine-bottles-recycled-cardboard-central-california/)
The idea has absolutely no foresight. They want to “lower the carbon footprint” by putting less carbon in the atmosphere and polluting the future’s soil and water even more.
