This is a good article that has almost nothing to do with the title. The title implies that once you put your plastic in the recycling it isn't actually recycled—this may or may not be true, but the article doesn't say either way. Unlike what would be implied by the title and the comments here so far, they actually have a pretty positive view of recycling programs, they just argue that they're not sufficient.<p>What the article is actually about is how recycling programs don't actually end up receiving most of the plastic that is consumed, and how even if they did it wouldn't be enough to solve the problem. We need to actually use less plastic in the first place, not recycle it once only to have it enter a landfill on the second use.
It's terrible, plastic recycling is a myth told by the petrol industry, that purposefully messed up the recycling labels and greenwashed the entire industry.<p>It's physically not possible to recycle plastic and get the same propriety back. About 10% of the plastic is "recycled" worlwide, meaning it's been reused to do something else but can't be used for the same thing (e.g: bottle -> insulation)
It's a different story between country, in Europe some country recycle a big part of their plastic:
<a href="https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20181212STO21610/plastic-waste-and-recycling-in-the-eu-facts-and-figures" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/201...</a>
Good article, but unfortunately it propagates the oft quoted "you eat a credit card worth of plastic each week" myth. Good video here explaining why it likely isn't true <a href="https://youtu.be/2Ntp6BqhSng" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/2Ntp6BqhSng</a>
As the article and other commenters have mentioned: The fate of plastics that end up in the recycling bin is complicated, but that doesn’t mean it all goes into the trash.<p>I’ve been fascinated by how much the cynics, contrarians, and people with certain political leanings latch on to this story and exaggerate it. I worked on a large campus where rumors began to spread after they installed recycling bins. The rumors, fueled by stories like this one, escalated to the point that some people insisted that the maintenance crew was secretly collecting recycling bins and dumping them into the trash at night when nobody was watching. They all had variations of the myth claiming they knew a guy who saw it happen one night or they talked to a friend who knows the maintenance people who admitted it was all fake. I endured some painful lectures from older people who explained that recycling was actually a psyop conducted to train us to be obedient because that’s how the elites wanted us to be. People in this camp stopped recycling aluminum and glass on principal, defiantly throwing it in the garbage and making a big deal about it in the process.<p>Eventually we got an email newsletter explaining where the recycling goes, what the recycling pickup company does with it, and including photos of where it ends up. This didn’t stop the hardcore conspiracy theorists, but it did stop the recycling wars from being a constant topic of debate.
And yet no national government will ban single use plastic bottles.<p>Where I live we are back to paper grocery bags, which I like better. But I can drive a few miles in state to get plastic bags for groceries.<p>I am old enough to have seen paper and glass replaced by plastic, time to go back and charge at least 1 USD per bottle to encourage recycling instead of 5 Cents. For people out side of the US, we are almost at the point were nothing costs less than 1 USD.
If you live in a well run democratic society, then your plastic packaging waste has a good chance of being recycled or incenerated with energy recovery:<p><a href="https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Packaging_waste_statistics#Recycling_and_recovery_targets_and_rates" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...</a>
The real shame is that plastic is used on so many immediately disposable things like packaging. Plastics have so many legitimate uses with no other material substitute, the fact that we just throw away so much of it needlessly is a huge part of the problem.
I think education is a major issue here. I know I used to recycle plastics, but after reading through comments on here, I would rather just throw it in the trash and know it will be at a landfill. This makes me feel better than the alternative, in which it is sent overseas and more likely to be dispersed throughout the environment.
Interesting thing to do:<p>1. Go to McDonalds and read the recycle notice on their drink cups.
2. Ask an employee if they recycle those drink cups.
3. Then go out into McDonalds parking lot and notice that their garbage containers do not separate out drink cups for recycling.<p>And this is the same whether the city that the McDonalds is in recycles plastic or not.
Ultimately it's clear that we need to accept the disruption and lobby our governments to just ban single-use plastics entirely. The amount of microplastics we're seeing in samples across the world in addition to the general pollution and hazards they cause poses a problem.
Well I'm old enough to have lived during Ceaușescu's times for a while and I remember very little plastic from back then.<p>Plastic bottles were basically unheard of. Glass or metal containers it was and they were also recycled. Bags were mostly cloth. Again, no plastic. So it's definitely possible to live in a much-less plastic polluted world.<p>Unfortunately we live in the society of "It's pretty amazing that our society has reached a point where the effort necessary to extract oil from the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, truck it to a store, but it, and bring it home is considered to be less effort that what it takes to just wash the spoon when you're done with it..."
The problem is economics: plastic is too cheap.<p>Perhaps we should consider taxing plastic on the producer side until renewable, durable, and recyclable materials are substituted.
Common plastic trash, AFAICT, is one of the least unpleasant kinds of trash. It's not toxic, it's not runny and does not get into the water table, it does not decompose into noxious gases, it does not self-ignite and does not burn easily, it can be compacted quite a lot.<p>I think storing waste plastic in a dry place, some desert, covered from wind, might be a pretty good solution, until we find a way to recycle this huge pile of simple organic molecules.
I assume my plastic recycling is what my council states - that it is burned (with the exhaust passing through scrubbers) to produce steam which is used to heat local businesses and public buildings, and generate a small amount of electricty, then the melted slag is collected and used as an asphalt replacement in road maintenance.<p>It seems fair enough, maybe not ideal, but it generates some extra use from the waste.
I wonder why there hasn’t been more effort behind replacing single use plastics for food/beverages. People get all up in arms about plastic straws, but then stick their paper straw in a big plastic single-use cup.<p>I also find it sad that some companies like Snapple are regressing, changing from glass to plastic bottles.
Ever since 2015, when China said that they know would no longer buy American waste plastic, it just gets sent to landfill. Almost all municipal plastic recycling programs in America have shut down.
I thought that this was mostly known that for a long time our "recycled" stuff was getting shipped to China and burned. That ended not that long ago so I wonder what they're actually doing with it now. Maybe actually recycling it perhaps?<p>It's a shame that this stuff is happening. Lots of feel good measures that aren't helping anything.