There needs to be regulation that standardizes on container materials and shapes, optimizing for recyclability and ability to sort. Then there needs to be a financial incentive to use packaging that offers the highest reclaimation rates. I'm imagining something like the CAFE standards, encouraging ever increasing rates.<p>I listened to a podcast with one of the former heads of the EPA and one of the challenges is that the petroleum industry actively favors non-reuse so they can keep selling more plastic.<p>Edit:
Here's the podcast: <a href="https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/to-the-point/the-high-cost-of-cheap-plastics" rel="nofollow">https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/to-the-point/the-high-cost-o...</a>
I feel like the entire concept of recycling from the very beginning has been a lie. Now we're all paying for what we thought was being handled properly.<p>Edit: Plastic recycling.
Overall, I think this is a good idea. a Lawsuit creates a financial incentive to behave better. However,<p>> It’s likely that less than 5% of plastic produced today is getting recycled<p>I've seen this repeated elsewhere, but what I really want to know is the % of plastics sent for recycling actually being recycled. Anything that wasn't turned in for recycling just doesn't count here, in my opinion.
I wish this went into what the factors are that make these products not recyclable. Contaminants attached to the product, I assume?<p>Siggi's yogurt containers (the large ones, at least) have a paper label and a tab you can tear to completely remove the paper from the plastic so they can be recycled properly. Which, of course, made me realize that probably nothing ELSE with a label on it is recyclable in the way we think they are.
This may be exactly the way to make change happen here in America. Corporations only understand the language of financial incentive. Coke and Pepsi and all single-use manufacturers need to be responsible for the costs of recycling the containers they create. In Germany, rulings and regulations in this vein have increased the proportion of recycled products to over 66%[1]. If corporations have no economic incentive to create recyclable products, they will act to externalize those costs as much as possible. With the worldwide economies of scale that Coke and Pepsi can leverage, we enter into a self-reinforcing plastic-industry sustaining death spiral.<p>1. <a href="https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/dsd/dsd_aofw_ni/ni_pdfs/NationalReports/germany/waste.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/dsd/...</a> [pdf warning]
May have been posted before, but I found it relevant that the "Georgia Recycling Coalition" put a hard stop on the suggestion of a bottle tax to help with recycling efforts.<p>“With the investment that Coke is getting ready to make in Atlanta and in other major cities across the U.S. with this World Without Waste (campaign), it is not going to be a part of that conversation.”<p><a href="https://www.wypr.org/post/investigation-digs-eco-corruption-local-recycling-programs-re-air" rel="nofollow">https://www.wypr.org/post/investigation-digs-eco-corruption-...</a>
It seems very strange to attack Coke and Pepsi for this. Shouldn't the target be recycling programs that claim to be recycling plastic bottles, but actually don't?
It seems like this problem has only been allowed to get so bad because it's a silent failure. We throw things in the recycling, and without any feedback we assume they are recycled.<p>The failure should be pushed up the chain, at least to the consumer. The rules on what can be recycled should be realistic and consistently enforced, then people can make more informed choices (up to and including pushing for regulation on manufacturers).
Meanwhile, Oil companies like Shell, are investing in production facilities to supersize plastic production, now that oil prices have fallen. [0]<p>And they are also trying to control the negative fallout [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://qz.com/1689529/nurdles-are-the-biggest-pollution-disaster-youve-never-heard-of/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/1689529/nurdles-are-the-biggest-pollution-dis...</a>
[1] <a href="https://www.fastcompany.com/90295292/the-worlds-big-plastic-makers-want-more-recycling-so-they-can-keep-pumping-out-plastic" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastcompany.com/90295292/the-worlds-big-plastic-...</a>
A few years ago I came up with the idea that instead of funding facial recognition, image-recognition technology could be used at dumps to recognize the brands associated with unrecycled trash passing through the chutes, then using that data to tax companies whose consumers create the most litter and throw away the most recyclables.