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vga , (edited )

NGL that’s more than I thought, but nevertheless: don’t use plastic if you can avoid it. It’s not easy to recycle.

For instance, for beverages, prefer cans or your own glass / metal water bottles.

That said, 9% is a huge lot better than 0%.

BruceTwarzen ,

The older i get the more disgusting i find plastic. I would never buy plastic tupperware ever again, drinking out of plastic bottles just feels wrong.

b161 ,

I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.

Most plastics due for recycling just gets shipped off to poor countries for “reclycing” but isn’t at all, and a lot of it just ends up in the ocean.

So you’re better off just throwing plastics in the garbage where it will at least end up in landfill and not in the ocean.

Thorny_Insight ,

That’s a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It’s all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I’ve got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.

Tiptopit ,

plasticexpert.co.uk/what-country-recycles-the-mos….

Germany has the highest recycling rate for plastics with 65 %. Not everything you put in the recycling bin is being recycled.

Thorny_Insight ,

Seems far more likely that the recycling rate is low because not every piece of plastic waste is put into recycling. Not that they simply don’t recycle it.

Tiptopit ,

The problem is that there are quite some different sorts of plastics and that plastic containers are not standardized. If you mix different kinds of plastics or plastics with other materials you can’t use it anymore in an automated processing and it usually gets burned. Also mostly recycling is a downgrade, so usually if you recycle some packaging, it is not made into packaging again but into things like pallets or construction fence bases.

Deceptichum ,
@Deceptichum@quokk.au avatar

In my country (Aus), last I heard our recycling was mostly shipped off to Indo or somewhere else in SEA (previously China before China banned it).

I suspect very little ever sees recycling, but the neoliberal model means privatised companies paid by government, so they’re out to cut expenses to maximise profits and shipping it off to someone else to do the illegal thing where it’s not illegal isn’t illegal.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

Haha… yeah I live in the Netherlands. And my city started separately collecting plastics.

Here’s the kicker: because there is no more plastic in our waste, the energy value of the waste went down. The city sold these waste “rights” to an incineration plant that reclaims heat and energy who now cannot use the waste. So to avoid contractual fines, our city now imports plastic waste from elsewhere in Europe to be mixed in with the waste and then incinerated.

Well fuck me!

  • This is more expensive for the city (separate bins, separate collection, separate processing, buying plastics from elsewhere and getting it here)
  • All the extra transport and shipping movements is worse for the environment.
  • I’m stuck with an extra fucking bin, and with both a greens bin and the rest bin that are collected once every 3 weeks instead of 2… stinking up the place even worse.

But I’m sure they meant well.

frazorth ,

It’s all being recycled into new products

I’m afraid its not. There are many plastics that don’t have any method of recycling, and plently more that require specific machinery for their “one time” recycling that just isn’t being used.commercially.

when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles

Even the PET bottles can only go through the process once or twice before becoming too degraded. That’s not even taking into account that most manufacturers want white or clear plastic, and recycled does not work that way.

The separation and recycling that you do is mostly gaslighting and green washing.

frazorth ,

Even if you look the Scandinavian countries which generally does better than the rest of the world, you are looking at only a 25% recycle rate.

finland.fi/…/finnish-innovations-for-overcoming-p…

Maalus ,

It’s because you can’t recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn’t work when it’s like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.

PrimeMinisterKeyes , (edited )

Once they touch the factory floor’s floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there’s just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.

MonkderVierte ,

Maybe with some additives? Or removing them, in the first place? But expensive i guess.

MonkderVierte ,

Gets burned here, same result like with oil it is made of.

Blackmist ,

It’s just a bad material that’s cheap to make things out of.

Once used, to my knowledge, it can’t be reused as the same thing, so they “recycle” it into road surfacing etc, which I’m sure doesn’t end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources…

And I’m not sure there’s a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.

Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they’re already taking it.

vga ,

I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.

Not just unprofitable in a capitalist sense, but inefficient. A typical plastic beverage container can be recycled two or three times before the plastic degrades too much to be usable.

Socialism won’t save you here. Unless said socialism bans plastic products.

brb ,

The situation looks better in EU according to this article

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/2750e910-6497-4a58-b21d-d341840ac069.png

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll be honest, that’s actually more than I would have guessed (ballpark would have been 5% or under), sad as that is.

Badeendje ,
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

I’ll bet the term recycled is actually open for interpretation, and the official use differs from our (pleb) expectations.

TerkErJerbs ,

I find it strange that more people haven’t put it together yet. The stuff plastics are made of is literally toxic byproduct from the O&G industry. Yes some of the products have extremely functional uses, but for the rest of it, they’re literally selling us their toxic waste and trying to make us responsible for disposing of it.

They might as well be standing outside the grocery stores with a barrel of goo and offering you a portion of it (for a price of course!) on your way out. So then you take it home and try to figure out what to do with it, and feel bad when you realize there is no way to dispose of it in an ethical way which is why they’re shoving the responsibility onto you.

ch00f ,

It really is frustrating. Like we even have resin codes. Little numbers printed that should indicate what kind of plastic it is.

I’m in Seattle. We have a robust recycling system. I still can’t find anywhere what resin code plastics they accept. The website just says “plastic bottles and jugs.”

I pay to use Ridwell. They accept plastic film and, as of recently, “multi-layer plastic.”

The only way to tell these apart is just by judging the plastic for how it feels. Plastic film is stretchier while multi-layer tends to be crinkly? Half the plastic we dispose of does not fall firmly in either camp, so we just do our best.

Why does it have to be this hard?

AbsoluteChicagoDog ,

Because recycling is not meant to be effective it’s meant to pass blame onto consumers

Semi_Hemi_Demigod ,
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world avatar

That’s why they should pay a tax for every pound of plastic they produce, with an equivalent refund for every pound they certifiably dispose of properly.

When you have to clean up your own mess you get good at it.

TerkErJerbs ,

They won’t even clean up their own oil well sites. Look up how many oil companies hide all their profits and then declare bankruptcy so that they can get the taxpayers to clean up after a given oilfield runs dry.

I don’t have a lot of hope in them taking care of the other end of the process either, unless it’s by force.

cashmaggot ,

Toxic waste in the soil, toxic waste in the products. Whee! I actually constantly do wonder what we could do to pump the breaks as a people. It's a difficult thing to think about, because I think the first step is getting people used to two things (at least here in America)

a) Things will not always be available when you go to the store
b) Things will not last as long as they typically have due to exposure

I'm not really sure how to get people on board because most are reactive not proactive and they tend to not react to things that can't directly correlate themselves or witness with their own eyes. I mean, also a lot of people are like me shrugging at what they cannot actively change.

I just try to buy intelligently, ride my things to their grave, and recycle and repurpose what I can. Shrugs.

Maggoty ,

Use glass, wood, and metal. The actual recyclable materials.

bobs_monkey ,

O&G?

Anti_Iridium ,

Oil and Gas?

bobs_monkey ,

Oh wow duh, thanks lol

Chessmasterrex , (edited )

Probably a terrible idea, but melting the plastic and extruding the plastic in underground abandoned mines, filling up the empty spaces like icing on a cake from floor to ceiling. There are abandoned lead mines in Oklahoma, where the town was vacated because of the toxicity and the ground collapsing underneath. A place like that seems ideal.

lauha ,

In Finland one mine had broken the law and dumped all their waste in the back of the mine and they were ordered to clean it up and they raised their hands up and said they couldn’t because it was too dangerous to work there. Govenment’s mining superviser dude turned out to be paid by the mining company, surprise!

Thorny_Insight ,

That assumes the plastic is already being collected, so why not just make new products from it instead of dumping it into the ground and then using even more oil to make new plastic?

randompasta ,

The recycling symbol for plastics was a great bit of marketing for the plastics industry. ‘Just buy a new thing and no worries you can just recycle it.’

Future geologists are going to see a marine deposit of plastic and be able to date exactly the age of the rock layer.

Usernameblankface ,
@Usernameblankface@lemmy.world avatar

They purposely made their symbols for non-recylable types of plastic look like the recycling symbol.

blimpkun ,

Don’t forget nuclear fallout. There’s even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.

makingrain ,
@makingrain@lemm.ee avatar

Don’t forget nuclear fallout. There’s even a term for when humans started to irrevocably fuck Earth: the Anthropocene.

Semi_Hemi_Demigod ,
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world avatar

And heavy metals from burning fossil fuels.

Just a thin, oily, radioactive, toxic smear in the record.

Ensign_Crab ,

Followed by the layer of shoes, then nothing.

weariedfae ,

The committee recently pulled the plug on the Anthropocene unfortunately. It was never official and they just rejected it this year.

Ephera ,

Yeah, I feel like this Wikipedia graphic puts it quite well why that was rejected:

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/9c98bce8-569b-4fbc-b4c3-679a8238fc11.png

You see that “Pleistocene” vertical bar? And you see that tiny sliver of “Holocene” at the top. Yeah, the Anthropocene folks were basically arguing that so many riveting things happened in the Holocene already, that we need to declare a new epoch for what’s happening now.

Besides, if we do continue to irrevocably fuck Earth and the current mass extinction event continues to wipe out a big chunk of life on Earth, then a future sentient species might declare our entire existence as just the geological event that ended the current era (Cenozoic).

echolalia ,

Survivors of the resource wars will send their children to the plastic mines to work for bottle caps

apfelwoiSchoppen ,
@apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world avatar

Almost like plastics recycling has been a scam all along perpetrated by the corporations to greenwash their business.

Reduce, then reuse, and if the other two cannot occur; recycle.

Repelle ,

This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.

grue ,

I imagine that goes the other way, too: by conflating the scam of plastics recycling with recycling in general, some people are probably discouraged from recycling anything at all, including aluminum.

EldritchFeminity ,

Plus the whole system was created with the idea of getting people used to recycling so when better, more efficient forms of recycling came into use, people would already be recycling.

Too bad that whole “better, more efficient” part never really happened.

cashmaggot ,

I worked at a university at one point in my life, and they were quite proud about their recycling plan. The janitors though, would just take the trash and the recycling and put the two bags together and throw them both away. I never really lived anywhere that recycled outside of the West Coast. But is it actually being recycled here? Is this the 9%?

SSJMarx ,

I feel like the bulk of the plastic that gets recycled is done in other developed countries that spend significant money on doing it. Like when I lived in Japan they were very stringent about separating your trash, same thing in Germany, and not for nothing those economies that do recycling at scale generally prefer glass over plastic because recycling glass is more efficient.

wafflez ,

Can’t find for total glass but just current rates for glass: “US’s roughly 33% glass-recycling rate” “90% recycling rate in Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries”

cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/…/i6

paraphrand ,

In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.

Ensign_Crab ,

9 percent seems high.

Fuckfuckmyfuckingass ,
@Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world avatar

The other 91% is in my balls.

TehBamski ,
@TehBamski@lemmy.world avatar

You’ve got some pretty big balls then.

agamemnonymous ,
@agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works avatar

Mom said it’s my turn with the testicular microplastics

AlexWIWA ,

No that’s where pee is stored

doingthestuff ,

In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.

Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.

Telodzrum ,

That’s a lot of plastic.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

I just burn it.

tpihkal ,

I want to hate your comment so much but reality is reality.

Plastics just don’t really get recycled. Despite the efforts made (the company I work for included), recycling is such a joke because it’s hard to even FIND sources that WILL recycle certain things because at the end of the day it likely doesn’t exist because it’s more expensive and sometimes has an even greater impact on the environment to recycle than to just keep buggering on.

That said, I don’t like you burning plastics. I grew up burning paper trash in barrels but we were still mindful of not releasing toxic fumes into the local environment. So, fuck you for that one.

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

I make sure the chimney takes it out of the environment.

tpihkal ,

How’s that then?

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

It’s a long chimney.

tpihkal ,

I wonder if it’s anything like this lighthouse I’m showing your mum right now?

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

My mother just passed away last week and I’m still pretty sore about it.

tpihkal ,

You miss out on a last chance or something?

SatansMaggotyCumFart ,

I missed out on a last chance to say good bye, because I was too busy burning my plastic.

tpihkal ,

Bruh, she told me to tell you she always wanted to love you.

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