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In America we do things differently. We carefully organize our recycling but instead of it being recycled it is sent to China, who extracts the tiny amount of v
by Pigalowda 4y ago
In America we do things differently. We carefully organize our recycling but instead of it being recycled it is sent to China, who extracts the tiny amount of value it can from it, and then buries or dumps the rest in the ocean. There’s some nice articles about it.
I’m stupid enough that I still performatively wash out the glass and aluminum so the workers in China have to do less. But what is a West coast American if not performative?
- mschuster91 4y agoI thought you were joking, then I looked up numbers, and WTF, y'all only recycle 33% of your glass [1] and barely half of your soda drink cans [2]. [1] https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recycling-US-broken/97/i6 https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy... [2] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/whats-holding-back-aluminum-recycling-in-the-us https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/whats-holding-back-alu...
- Pigalowda 4y agoThe first article does blame the consumer education and habits, which is funny. When a company bids on a contract from the government it is much easier and cheaper to collect the “recycling” and ship to China for pseudo-sorting and disposal rather than developing the infrastructure to properly recycle. Cheapest bid wins here in the US so it gets shipped out and the “uneducated” consumer gets the blame for the policy. In the end how can you encourage someone who does not recycle to do so with this ridiculous reality in place? There’s a nice NYT article about it from a few years ago.