3 ms·

I used to hear that quite a large portion of plastic that you think you are "recycling" is in fact simply landfilled because there is no market for it. Not sure

• liveoneggs 8y ago
  it depends on the price of oil
• lozenge 8y ago
  Recycling should really be called downcycling. With plastic as with paper, the quality of the recycled product is lower than the original, unless enough new material is mixed in.
• strainer 8y ago
  Landfill sites amount to a very small portion of overall land usage of human industry. Beyond making sure reusable and affordably recyclable stuff is not being wasted, the wider environment is not improved or significantly relieved by expensive efforts to reduce landfill. The immediate environmental action priorities should surely be: - Taking waste out of habitat ( collection and filtration ) - Reducing waste going into habitat ( biodegradable material use, design re-usability and reliability, affordable recycling ) - Study and assist heavily disrupted natural systems. We don't have to be able to reprocess all of the waste collected since there is relative space to simply store it while we work on the technology and clean energy supply to make it reusable. I believe advanced landfill as a long term waste curing and storage ability should be considered a big part of urgent clean industry and not characterised as a major problem in itself.