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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

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.

Ensign_Crab ,

9 percent seems high.

reddig33 ,

That could be fixed with “virgin nondegradable plastic” taxes, deposit/return fees, and regulations on single use plastics.

But unfortunately the fossil fuel industry calls the shots in most places.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

_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.

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