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> It's not them making the waste - it's the people-consumers who are not throwing the bottles away for recycling I can't tell if this is ignorant or ill-intend
by DoingIsLearning 4y ago
> It's not them making the waste - it's the people-consumers who are not throwing the bottles away for recycling
I can't tell if this is ignorant or ill-intended. The 'recycled' material from these markets is getting shipped to Southeast Asia and dumped in landfills as per the original link in this submission.
Ask yourself if what you say is real, then there would be no need for new plastic from crude oil since our market would be interely circular with recycled plastic.
Plastic recycling pelets have a very limited use and there are only a handful of countries were consumers care about it where manufacturers mix in some recycled pelets and claim the plastic is from (partially) recicled plastic.
Recycled plastic is greyish in coloration (you can't make it transparent) and far more brittle than 'new' plastic. Recycling plastic was a con all along to allow corporations to make a fortune on packaging cost savings.
- Huh1337 4y agoOK, and what kind of regulation do you envision to solve this problem?
- bombcar 4y agoWe could demand reusable glass bottles but some say the washing takes more energy than new. Maybe aluminum would work.
- bobthepanda 4y agoWashing, and transport. Plastic is the lightest, thinnest packaging material we have. Reducing its use may means trucks carrying less stuff that is heavier.
- bombcar 4y agoYeah, according to https://www.roetell.com/glass-vs-plastic-vs-aluminum-containers/ https://www.roetell.com/glass-vs-plastic-vs-aluminum-contain... it can be a 40:1 ratio. Though you could counter-act that with more local bottling plants so that transport is shorter. In other words, don't bottle the soda in George and ship it to New York or whatever, but actually have multiple local bottling/washing plants in New York itself.
- bobthepanda 4y agoUnfortunately, after three decades of de-industrialization and gentrification, there isn't really cheap industrial land on which to site a bottling plants in NYC city limits.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoI commented on this before on hacker news: - Plastic is cheap to produce but difficult to recycle. Create quotas for 'new' plastic and make packagers bid for plastic in a plastic market managed by plastic producers. Petro-chemical producers still make money with less volume manufactured, since packagers have to bid for new plastic, paying more for it. This also forces more recycling since it is more competitive in comparison than outbiding in a new plastic market. - Ban single-use plastic except for medical/lab applications. - Enforce return schemes for plastic and glass at consumer shops but payed for by packagers. People will complain that prices go up but that should have been corrected a long time ago. There is no free lunch, you can't have near free cost packaging without some consequence, in this case we already have plastic in intra-uterine babies, I say the buck should stop here.
- bobthepanda 4y agoSome countries and states require companies to pay for the cost of recycling, or higher fees if the material is not recyclable. We could simply jack those up. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-2-summer/notes-here-there/shifting-costs-recycling-manufacturers-not-consumers?amp https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-2-summer/notes-here-t...