That's because "recycling" is just the packaging industries way of avoiding blame for manufacturing infinite garbage.<p>One day the world might realise that we live in an infinite garbage world because we pay the packaging industry to make infinite garbage.<p>Recycling is not meant to work, it's meant to keep attention away from the packaging industries role in destroying our beautiful planet.<p>It's all about the money.<p>The solution isn't to clean up/recycle the garbage - it's to stop making it.<p>Turn off the tap.<p>It's like the sugar industry - for decades everyone thought that obesity was caused by fat in food and the solution was to eat less fatty food and to lose weight by exercise. This suited the sugar industry extremely well because it turns out that obesity is caused mainly by sugar, but they no doubt big sugar was very happy that everyone was pointing the finger at fat as the problem and exercise as the solution - that lets the sugar industry off the hook very nicely.<p>The packaging industry must laugh behind its hands at all the people trying to recycle and clean up all the garbage that it makes, when the real solution - which no-one currently proposes - is just to stop manufacturing garbage in the first place. Everyone is focused on how to deal with the garbage - there's no problem to deal with if you stop making it.<p>If you read all the comments in this thread you'll see how the number one focus of most people is to work out how to handle the packaging - there's no questioning at all of why it exists.
When I read something like this I really wish the people who use all their smarts for selling more ads to sell more crap would instead work on figuring out trash separation and recycling. It's a very interesting problem: Recognizing different items, handle it, and recycle it. It has it all: AI, computer vision, robotics. It would make the world a much better place.
Why is plastic pyrolysis not being employed to recycle on a massive scale? Seems all that is needed is to site them near oil refineries, and you have a clean, self-powering means of recycling plastic into oil/fuel.
Wow the stat about Russia shocked me. So I looked it up [1]. Some rough reference points for men living to 65: Canada is 88%. U.S. is 82%. Russia is 57%.<p>[1] <a href="https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?view=chart" rel="nofollow">https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?view=...</a>
There's also the fact that it often gets shipped very long distances.<p>It'd be helpful if we placed much more emphasis on reduce and reuse, so there's less in the first place. Patagonia is a good example of a company doing this, but an all too rare one.