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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.

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.

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?

Ensign_Crab ,

9 percent seems high.

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.

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.

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.

Telodzrum ,

That’s a lot of plastic.

TehBamski ,
@TehBamski@lemmy.world avatar

For anyone interested in increasing that number in any way they can, check out earth911.com for hundreds of ideas and ways to help recycle, reduce, and reuse things in your everyday life.

Here’s a link to learn about how to properly recycle or dispose of things. Categorized into nine kinds of materials.

And here’s a link to their Recycling Solution Search, where you can select the thing you desire to recycle and then enter a zip code.

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.

_sideffect ,

Recycling was the last in the list of what to do.

The problem is we forgot about Reduce and Reuse… The two most important things.

We use way too much instead.

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

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

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.

expatriado ,

that 8% more than i thought

Rhaedas ,

9% is only recycled once, only 1% has been truly reused multiple times, so you're close enough.

Also:

Of the remaining waste, 12% was incinerated and 79% was either sent to landfills or lost to the environment as pollution.

They're the same thing. Incinerated is lost as pollution, it just happened to have one more use on the way there.

And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!

mkwt ,

Incinerated plastic releases green house gases and some amount of micro plastics in the uncombusted ash.

Landfill plastic seemingly just erodes into micro plastics over long time scales.

can , (edited )

And I just realized, this wikipedia page linked is almost 10 years out of date!

You know what must be done.

TehBamski ,
@TehBamski@lemmy.world avatar

That’s 90% off of where I believe we should be before the end of the decade.

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