Don't waste your time recycling plastic

Washington Post: &quot;Don’t waste your time recycling plastic&quot;<p>New York City Administrative Code: &quot;Any person who violates this chapter... shall be liable for a civil penalty.. in an amount of twenty-five dollars for the first violation, fifty dollars for the second violation and one hundred dollars for the third and each subsequent violation... A person committing a fourth and any subsequent violation within a period of six months shall be classified as a persistent violator and shall be liable for a civil penalty of five hundred dollars for each violation&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;law.justia.com&#x2F;codes&#x2F;new-york&#x2F;2006&#x2F;new-york-city-administrative-code-new&#x2F;adc016-324_16-324.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;law.justia.com&#x2F;codes&#x2F;new-york&#x2F;2006&#x2F;new-york-city-adm...</a> (Title 16 sanitation, chapter 3 solid waste recycling, subchapter 6 REGULATIONS SUBMITTED TO COUNCIL AND ENFORCEMENT)<p>Not an idle threat, either, my apartment building has been fined in the past.

The aluminum collected from aluminum drives in WW2 wasn&#x27;t really used all that much, but it did make everyone feel like the war was important and that they were contributing. Similar thing with blood drives after 9&#x2F;11, most of which was thrown out.<p>Even if recycling plastic doesn&#x27;t do much (a claim I&#x27;m not certain about), it makes you think about the planet every time you throw something away. This can carry over into other behaviors, i.e. making people more adherent to recycling metal (or anything at all!), composting, reusing items, or whatever. It&#x27;s important to be right about these things and not just correct.

This seems to be true for many plastics but PET seems to prove to be valuable as recycling material. The Lidl Schwarz group actually went into recycling recently and I doubt that they do it for feel good [0] . I also doubt that most of mixed packaging but also tons of coated card board has any chance of recycling.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gruppe.schwarz&#x2F;en&#x2F;press&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;lidl-and-kaufland-100-percent-recycled-pet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gruppe.schwarz&#x2F;en&#x2F;press&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;lidl-and-kaufla...</a>

[At this very moment, we all have microplastics coursing through our bodies. This is not the fault of not enough recycling. This is the fault of too much plastic. So I say: Let’s treat plastic like the toxic waste it is and send it where it can hurt people the least. Right now, that place is the landfill.]<p>Wonder why the author favors this option over incineration, which to me seems as being the better approach to get rid of it.

There&#x27;s a chicken-egg problem here, which is that if nobody sorts their waste then there&#x27;s no incentive to find better usages for it. I don&#x27;t mind sorting my waste even if it still ends up in a landfill, just in case maybe the sorted waste supply will make it easier to find non-landfill usages for it.<p>Not that landfills are inherently bad - like the article implies, it&#x27;s really the creation of the waste in the first place which is the problem.<p>It benefits me to have sorted waste anyway, since the non-recyclable garbage is more prone to attracting pests and a separate recycling stream helps to make the quantity of garbage more manageable. But what&#x27;s even better for that is municipal organics&#x2F;food waste collection.

Sure, if you can get away with it.<p>San Francisco Environment Department will fine your condo building up to $30,000 a month if a Waste Management pickup truck deems you didn&#x27;t recycling enough plastic. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfenvironment.org&#x2F;zerowastefacilitator-faq" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sfenvironment.org&#x2F;zerowastefacilitator-faq</a> My HOA has been fined and now threatens to search our trashbags to identify us.<p>Stale regulations failing to keep up with reality.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Y0kqm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Y0kqm</a>

Counterpoint to this doomerism, obviously region specific but TFA didn&#x27;t bother specifying where in the world they&#x27;re talking about with their broad brush statements about &quot;downcycling&quot; and &quot;70% virgin plastic&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startribune.com&#x2F;recycling-real-twin-cities-minnesota-ad-campaign-dragon-unicorn&#x2F;600336731&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startribune.com&#x2F;recycling-real-twin-cities-minne...</a><p>Where is the contradiction in believing both that we use too much plastic and should act on individual and governmental levels to reduce it, and that sending a PET bottle to the landfill is a child&#x27;s tantrum and not some heroic defiance of the plastic industry?

Everyone should be using glass deposit bottles.

I don’t have a written source for this but we toured the landfill&#x2F;recycling center in elementary school. Remember distinctly being shown how _only_ the thick necks and bottom portions of number 1 and 2 plastics can be recycled. Plastic bottle caps, as mentioned by the speaker, could not be recycled. It always stuck with me.<p>Maybe (commercial?) recycling tech has improved to be able to do something with less dense plastic sections but seems diminishing returns. To be fair I’ve seen some cool maker videos of people cutting a bottle into “wire” for 3d printing etc. - but that’s not a commercial&#x2F;global solution.

Behavior change on this is going to be such a slog. Made worse by the &quot;told-ya-so&quot;s who generally weren&#x27;t very helpful to begin with. Might be better to make specialized plastic landfills just to keep the current behaviors active and not ostracize people&#x27;s hard work on recycling campaigns. As long as we do something that keeps the plastic out of water systems I&#x27;m good with that. And as the writer noted, the real issue is reducing the amount of it in the first place.

Unfortunately it&#x27;s true that a lot of plastic is just burnt.<p>In Sweden we consider ourselves as very advanced in recycling but there was just a story in the news today where they said that old snow toys were just NOW, sometimes, being recycled. Even though it costs more to recycle them than to burn them, some companies are making the effort to recycle them just to be more environmental.<p>But I&#x27;ve been recycling plastics in my home for a decade. So wtf...

I wonder if 20 years ago same guy was suggestion to give up electric cars because they are too expensive.<p>The discussion of what is the best way to deal with plastics should be done with data, formulas and graphs not with opinions.<p>And on top of that, there is not even one material &quot;plastic&quot; it&#x27;s a class of materials, and for which probably the solution is different, like some should be forbidden, others recycled, etc.

You could sort your yogurt pots in to separate boxes from now until the end of days... It still wont offset the carbon cost of one jet taken to an eco-awareness conference.<p>We as a species aren&#x27;t going to solve the macro issue unfortunately. The best thing you can do is think local and minimise the direct impact on yourself. I&#x27;d suggest starting by buying a house on a hill.

This is crazy. Recycling plastic is important. The missing piece is the in and out mechanism has failed. For example, every pound of plastic China exports, they need to be required to import a pound back for recycling. They need to be responsible for their plastic exports. Very simple.

Don&#x27;t waste your time recycling anything.. something like 95% of all recyclables that are recycled by people end up in the landfill with the rest of the garbage.. this is actually common knowledge

I recall seeing the super of my building mixing the trash and recycling. Really turned me off to the impact of separating our refuse.

1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle<p>In that order

Good timing, the latest Skeptoid podcast takes a critical look at recycling:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skeptoid.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;4932" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skeptoid.com&#x2F;episodes&#x2F;4932</a><p>tl;dr - PET and LDPE are worth recycling in the US, those have 1 and 2 in the recycle symbol<p>Other countries check your local area. Different local government can recycle different things.

Consider this. Say completely neutral and impartial scientists have all the data that they need on how certain corporations and industries are having an impact on the environment. Those same corporations still have millions or billions of dollars to frame the narrative. That’s how you got the “carbon footprint” (BP). That’s how “actually you just need to recycle” can be astroturfed. That’s how the conversation and “discourse” can be focused around “consumer choice” and discipline.<p>The result is that everyone knows what the problems are (see: scientists). But you’re stuck spinning your wheels on the BS busywork created by the marketing&#x2F;spin departments of those corporations.<p>And then there’s you. You’re just one gal. Okay, so maybe you’re cynical to a practical degree so you’re by-default skeptical of whatever “organic trend” that comes up on this topic. But so what? The regular people that are vocal on this issue are gonna come off as naive do-gooders. <i>How could it hurt? Don’t you care about the environment?</i> And what’s your retort to that? You can give them a three-paragraph lecture like this one here and feel like a mid-20th socialist intellectual giving a speech on Ideology. But you’re gonna come off as a crank. Old man&#x2F;woman yelling at sky. Just some random person with an anti-social pet peeve. So you just go along with it even though it’s gonna end up in the same dump somewhere, you presume.

Yeah, take that experts!<p>We&#x27;re just going to throw the bottles in the trash like the plastic and fossil fuel companies always wanted us to do.<p>That&#x27;ll show them!

yet another &quot;crazy uncle conspiracy theory&quot; proves out, another popular gospel shown false.<p>many plastics are good fuel; but it&#x27;s been difficult to say so for years because the &quot;science was settled&quot; that recycling was The Way.